Why in news? Several users of the social media platform , used “speech synthesis” and “voice cloning” service provider, ElevenLabs, to make voice deepfakes of celebrities resulted in racist, abusive, and violent audio comments.

Highlights

What are voice deep fakes?

• A voice deep fake is one that closely mimics a real person’s voice.
• The voice can accurately replicate tonality, accents, cadence, and other unique characteristics of the target person.
• People use AI and robust computing power to generate such voice clones or synthetic voices.

How are voice deep fakes created?

• To create deep fakes one needs high-end computers with powerful graphics cards, leveraging cloud computing power.
• Powerful computing hardware can accelerate the process of rendering, which can take hours, days, and even weeks, depending on the process.
• Besides specialised tools and software, generating deep fakes need training data to be fed to AI models and this data are often original recordings of the target person’s voice.
• AI can use this data to render an authentic-sounding voice, which can then be used to say anything.

What are the threats arising from the use of voice deepfakes?

• Attackers are using such technology to defraud users, steal their identity, and to engage in various other illegal activities like phone scams and posting fake videos on social media platforms.

What tools are used for voice cloning?

• OpenAI’s Vall-e, My Own Voice, Resemble, Descript, ReSpeecher, and iSpeech are some of the tools that can be used in voice cloning.

What are the ways to detect voice deepfakes?

• Detecting voice deepfakes need highly advanced technologies, software, and hardware to break down speech patterns, background noise, and other elements.
• Cyber security tools have yet to create fool proof ways to detect audio deepfakes.
• Research labs use watermarks and block chain technologies to detect deep fake technology, but the tech designed to outsmart deep fake detectors is constantly evolving.
• Programmes like Deep trace are helping to provide protection. Deep trace uses a combination of antivirus and spam filters that monitor incoming media and quarantine suspicious content.
• Call-back functions can end suspicious calls and request an outbound call to the account owner for direct confirmation.
• Multifactor authentication (MFA) and anti-fraud solutions can also reduce deepfake risks.

Question

• What is ‘voice cloning’? Explain the potential threats around artificial speech synthesis?