6 ms·

Impressive. But also enabling the next gen of "Mom, I'm in Mexican jail. Quickly wire me $2,000 so I can get out." scams.

by eps 10y ago

d--b 10y ago
And Black mirror's "would you like to speak with your dead husband again?"
- Ygg2 10y ago
  Forget dead husbands, with this tech, it will be hard to trust anything a politician said. Basically, once they master adding this to video, ANYTHING could be construed against anyone. Want a video of a politician saying "Hitler was right" to cheering masses? Want a video about a president saying it's time to start Nuclear War One? You can make that.
  - efaref 10y ago
    I can't wait to hear the new cassetteboy songs.
  - la_oveja 10y ago
    In the future: PGP signed speeches.
    - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      You joke, but I strongly suspect Authenticated Personal Trust is absolutely going to have become a thing.
  - tobr 10y ago
    And any genuine recording can be plausibly denied.
  - d00b 10y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk hf
    - i336_ 10y ago
      Hi. This is your first and only post, you have no submissions or favorites, and your account is 193 days old. I'm very curious (and perplexed) as to why you have linked a video from elsewhere in this thread with no supporting context regarding its relevance other than "hf".
  - rbryan13 10y ago
    We already couldn't trust anything a politician said! But indeed, this is the moral equivalent of how Photoshop has nearly undermined photographic evidence. That leaves video, and it's starting to succumb. Synthetic video AI politician, well, Robert Heinlein wrote _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ in 1966.
    - cooper12 10y ago
      > Photoshop has nearly undermined photographic evidence No it hasn't, not at all.
      - meesterdude 10y ago
        > No it hasn't, not at all. What do you mean? it most certainly has. It is much harder to look at a photograph now and say for sure it's real. Before photoshop, there were ways of manipulating photos, but they were much harder and did not yield nearly as good results. You can photoshop people into photos they were not originally in, doing things they have never done. Even Trump is having his hands enlarged in photos. Maybe you're speaking specifically about "evidence" in the legal sense. I can't speak to that. But there are countless examples where you can't (and shouldn't) believe what you see, because it's not real.
        fasteddie 10y ago
        Certainly it raises the bar for skepticism, but I can think of relatively few cases where a photoshopped image has driven a news cycle/key event because someone famous/important believed it to be real. Most doctored images/videos get snuffed out by the media very quickly if they grow viral.
        meesterdude 10y ago
        So because you can think of relatively few cases where key figures were duped, it therefore must not be a problem? That hypothesis fails to account for the rest of humanity. I have a friend who believes in aliens. They showed me a video that someone had put together of "footage". They were seriously showing it to me as evidence, to convince me that they are real, based on this video. I was shocked they were so serious - and having a hard time containing my laughter. I later found a number of other videos debunking the videos and clips that video was based off of - but my friend still believes in aliens, based on those videos. And this is someone I regularly have "intelligent" conversations with. This change, the ability to put words in someones mouth, is the next photoshop. And it WILL have consequences to it, good and bad. And we are not prepared for that, as a society - we haven't gotten over photoshop yet.
  - jfroma 10y ago
    I was thinking the same when I saw an Adobe demo about a similar product. But then I realize that I have listen voice imitators mocking politicians very accurately. Maybe having this technology at hand will make everyone realise that we can't trust an audio recording.
  - billybiro 10y ago
    "Forget dead husbands, with this tech, it will be hard to trust anything a politician said." Like we can trust anything a politician says/has said today anyway!
    - Ygg2 10y ago
      I meant it as you can't trust recording of what someone said. Basically any audio could be faked. Which would be great for people like Trump. "Trust me, that audio is fake news. Fake!"
  - suddensleep 10y ago
    From the "Ethics" section of the Lyrebird site: "Voice recordings are currently considered as strong pieces of evidence in our societies and in particular in jurisdictions of many countries. Our technology questions the validity of such evidence as it allows to easily manipulate audio recordings. This could potentially have dangerous consequences such as misleading diplomats, fraud and more generally any other problem caused by stealing the identity of someone else. By releasing our technology publicly and making it available to anyone, we want to ensure that there will be no such risks. We hope that everyone will soon be aware that such technology exists and that copying the voice of someone else is possible. More generally, we want to raise attention about the lack of evidence that audio recordings may represent in the near future." I'm glad the authors addressed this issue pretty forthrightly, but part of me wishes they'd written a bit more about exactly your point. Whether or not recorded speech will continue to be legally binding evidence, I think it's just as important to point out that many people are normally quite happy to take what they hear as solid evidence, especially when it aligns with their prejudices.
afarrell 10y ago
I wonder how long until we have an audio file of Paul Ryan saying something horrendous.
- SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
  <lowhangingfruit>Just switch on CNN</lowhangingfruit>
PetitPrince 10y ago
Wouldn't you need tons and tons of training data ? Obama, Clinton and Trump are public personalities, so it's easy to have many hours of recording of their voices. A random relative; not so much.
- mverwijs 10y ago
  They claim to only need 1 minute of recording. In this age of all the kids sharing everything all the time that shouldn't be too hard to acquire.
  - ygjb 10y ago
    Even better, targeted attacks against a person to collect their voice could involve contacting them for an opinion survey regarding a product, survey, or political opinion they value. Gleaning something like that from social media profiles is fairly easy.
    - carewornalien 10y ago
      "My voice is my passport. Verify me."
- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  It claims that it only needs a minute of audio.
- mxfh 10y ago
  Do you know the voices of your second or third degree relatives? Telephone scams are quite a well organized crime by now in Germany. If they can extend the target audience from elderly people to the general public by this means, they dont really care about some negative contacts. http://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2016/how-to-beat-grandparent-scam.html http://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2016/how-to-beat-... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enkeltrick https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enkeltrick If they really need a voice sample from a relative they could still impost, with voice or not, as insurance person, HR or police and acquire it by simple means if they have any idea about the social graph of their victim.
nannal 10y ago
If this is anything like adobe's system then you need a fairly extensive library of the target speaking naturally (~20 hours), so to pull off a scam like that you'll want to try and get into alexa, siri, cortana or Google's library and find a heavy user.
- Steeeve 10y ago
  It states that it only needs about a minute of someones voice.
- pnutjam 10y ago
  Interesting that companies are trying to get us used to taking to our computers.
backpropaganda 10y ago
The advantage of this method is that you can train on random speech datasets, and then using only a minute or two, find the "voice embedding" of a person, and generate anything with his/her voice. This voice embedding is much like the word2vec word vectors, and have similar arithmetic properties. Responding to multiple sibling comments.
arghwhat 10y ago
"But you just went out the door 10 minutes ago, and we live in France! How did it happen?! I'll wire it right away!"
galfarragem 10y ago
And Terminators.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT_u9Rurrqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT_u9Rurrqg
- mavdi 10y ago
  First thing that came to my mind. We're assembling the pieces one at a time.
rtehfm 10y ago
Or 1) planting evidence (no need for extended wire taps, 2) voice recognition software for access control, and 3) nearly any other fraud that will exploit the acceptance/authorization of verbal consent.

Impressive. But also enabling the next gen of "Mom, I'm in Mexican jail. Quickly wire me $2,000 so I can get out." scams.

by eps 10y ago

Impressive. But also enabling the next gen of "Mom, I'm in Mexican jail. Quickly wire me $2,000 so I can get out." scams.

d--b 10y ago

And Black mirror's "would you like to speak with your dead husband again?"

Ygg2 10y ago
Forget dead husbands, with this tech, it will be hard to trust anything a politician said. Basically, once they master adding this to video, ANYTHING could be construed against anyone. Want a video of a politician saying "Hitler was right" to cheering masses? Want a video about a president saying it's time to start Nuclear War One? You can make that.
- efaref 10y ago
  I can't wait to hear the new cassetteboy songs.
- la_oveja 10y ago
  In the future: PGP signed speeches.
  - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    You joke, but I strongly suspect Authenticated Personal Trust is absolutely going to have become a thing.
- tobr 10y ago
  And any genuine recording can be plausibly denied.
- d00b 10y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk hf
  - i336_ 10y ago
    Hi. This is your first and only post, you have no submissions or favorites, and your account is 193 days old. I'm very curious (and perplexed) as to why you have linked a video from elsewhere in this thread with no supporting context regarding its relevance other than "hf".
- rbryan13 10y ago
  We already couldn't trust anything a politician said! But indeed, this is the moral equivalent of how Photoshop has nearly undermined photographic evidence. That leaves video, and it's starting to succumb. Synthetic video AI politician, well, Robert Heinlein wrote _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ in 1966.
  - cooper12 10y ago
    > Photoshop has nearly undermined photographic evidence No it hasn't, not at all.
    - meesterdude 10y ago
      > No it hasn't, not at all. What do you mean? it most certainly has. It is much harder to look at a photograph now and say for sure it's real. Before photoshop, there were ways of manipulating photos, but they were much harder and did not yield nearly as good results. You can photoshop people into photos they were not originally in, doing things they have never done. Even Trump is having his hands enlarged in photos. Maybe you're speaking specifically about "evidence" in the legal sense. I can't speak to that. But there are countless examples where you can't (and shouldn't) believe what you see, because it's not real.
      - fasteddie 10y ago
        Certainly it raises the bar for skepticism, but I can think of relatively few cases where a photoshopped image has driven a news cycle/key event because someone famous/important believed it to be real. Most doctored images/videos get snuffed out by the media very quickly if they grow viral.
        meesterdude 10y ago
        So because you can think of relatively few cases where key figures were duped, it therefore must not be a problem? That hypothesis fails to account for the rest of humanity. I have a friend who believes in aliens. They showed me a video that someone had put together of "footage". They were seriously showing it to me as evidence, to convince me that they are real, based on this video. I was shocked they were so serious - and having a hard time containing my laughter. I later found a number of other videos debunking the videos and clips that video was based off of - but my friend still believes in aliens, based on those videos. And this is someone I regularly have "intelligent" conversations with. This change, the ability to put words in someones mouth, is the next photoshop. And it WILL have consequences to it, good and bad. And we are not prepared for that, as a society - we haven't gotten over photoshop yet.
- jfroma 10y ago
  I was thinking the same when I saw an Adobe demo about a similar product. But then I realize that I have listen voice imitators mocking politicians very accurately. Maybe having this technology at hand will make everyone realise that we can't trust an audio recording.
- billybiro 10y ago
  "Forget dead husbands, with this tech, it will be hard to trust anything a politician said." Like we can trust anything a politician says/has said today anyway!
  - Ygg2 10y ago
    I meant it as you can't trust recording of what someone said. Basically any audio could be faked. Which would be great for people like Trump. "Trust me, that audio is fake news. Fake!"
- suddensleep 10y ago
  From the "Ethics" section of the Lyrebird site: "Voice recordings are currently considered as strong pieces of evidence in our societies and in particular in jurisdictions of many countries. Our technology questions the validity of such evidence as it allows to easily manipulate audio recordings. This could potentially have dangerous consequences such as misleading diplomats, fraud and more generally any other problem caused by stealing the identity of someone else. By releasing our technology publicly and making it available to anyone, we want to ensure that there will be no such risks. We hope that everyone will soon be aware that such technology exists and that copying the voice of someone else is possible. More generally, we want to raise attention about the lack of evidence that audio recordings may represent in the near future." I'm glad the authors addressed this issue pretty forthrightly, but part of me wishes they'd written a bit more about exactly your point. Whether or not recorded speech will continue to be legally binding evidence, I think it's just as important to point out that many people are normally quite happy to take what they hear as solid evidence, especially when it aligns with their prejudices.

afarrell 10y ago

I wonder how long until we have an audio file of Paul Ryan saying something horrendous.

SturgeonsLaw 10y ago
<lowhangingfruit>Just switch on CNN</lowhangingfruit>

PetitPrince 10y ago

Wouldn't you need tons and tons of training data ? Obama, Clinton and Trump are public personalities, so it's easy to have many hours of recording of their voices. A random relative; not so much.

mverwijs 10y ago
They claim to only need 1 minute of recording. In this age of all the kids sharing everything all the time that shouldn't be too hard to acquire.
- ygjb 10y ago
  Even better, targeted attacks against a person to collect their voice could involve contacting them for an opinion survey regarding a product, survey, or political opinion they value. Gleaning something like that from social media profiles is fairly easy.
  - carewornalien 10y ago
    "My voice is my passport. Verify me."
jasonlfunk 10y ago
It claims that it only needs a minute of audio.
mxfh 10y ago
Do you know the voices of your second or third degree relatives? Telephone scams are quite a well organized crime by now in Germany. If they can extend the target audience from elderly people to the general public by this means, they dont really care about some negative contacts. http://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2016/how-to-beat-grandparent-scam.html http://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2016/how-to-beat-... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enkeltrick https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enkeltrick If they really need a voice sample from a relative they could still impost, with voice or not, as insurance person, HR or police and acquire it by simple means if they have any idea about the social graph of their victim.

nannal 10y ago

If this is anything like adobe's system then you need a fairly extensive library of the target speaking naturally (~20 hours), so to pull off a scam like that you'll want to try and get into alexa, siri, cortana or Google's library and find a heavy user.

Steeeve 10y ago
It states that it only needs about a minute of someones voice.
pnutjam 10y ago
Interesting that companies are trying to get us used to taking to our computers.

backpropaganda 10y ago

The advantage of this method is that you can train on random speech datasets, and then using only a minute or two, find the "voice embedding" of a person, and generate anything with his/her voice. This voice embedding is much like the word2vec word vectors, and have similar arithmetic properties. Responding to multiple sibling comments.

arghwhat 10y ago

"But you just went out the door 10 minutes ago, and we live in France! How did it happen?! I'll wire it right away!"

galfarragem 10y ago

And Terminators.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT_u9Rurrqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT_u9Rurrqg

mavdi 10y ago
First thing that came to my mind. We're assembling the pieces one at a time.

rtehfm 10y ago

Or 1) planting evidence (no need for extended wire taps, 2) voice recognition software for access control, and 3) nearly any other fraud that will exploit the acceptance/authorization of verbal consent.