NEW AI VOICE-CLONING TOOLS 'ADD FUEL' TO MISINFORMATION FIRE

In a video from a Jan. 25 news report, President Joe Biden talks about tanks. But a doctored version of the video has amassed hundred of thousands of views this week on social media, making it appear he gave a speech that attacks transgender people.

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Digital forensics experts say the video was created using a new generation of artificial intelligence tools, which allow anyone to quickly generate audio simulating a person’s voice with a few clicks of a button. And while the Biden clip on social media may have failed to fool most users this time, the clip shows how easy it now is for people to generate hateful and disinformation-filled “deepfake” videos that could do real-world harm.

“Tools like this are going to basically add more fuel to fire,” said Hafiz Malik, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan who focuses on multimedia forensics. “The monster is already on the loose.”

It arrived last month with the beta phase of ElevenLabs’ voice synthesis platform, which allowed users to generate realistic audio of any person’s voice by uploading a few minutes of audio samples and typing in any text for it to say.

The startup says the technology was developed to dub audio in different languages for movies, audiobooks, and gaming to preserve the speaker’s voice and emotions.