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How is AI voice faking any different than any other type of faking? How is it different than a manipulated recording, or a recording where someone is imitating

How is AI voice faking any different than any other type of faking? How is it different than a manipulated recording, or a recording where someone is imitating another? It is just as easy to fake many paper documents, and we have accepted documents as evidence for centuries. Photos can be faked, video can be edited or faked, witnesses lie or misremember. Is this just about telling lawyers that unvetted audio recordings can be unreliable? Because that shouldn't be news. Edit: this is a good faith question. I'm legitimately just curious. Splicing and editing have been around since recording was invented, I was legitimately curious why voice recordings would have been given extra evidential weight when manipulating recordings is a known possibility.

gdulli 2y ago
"We've had projectile murder for centuries with arrows, how are these machine guns and missiles any different?"
rout39574 2y ago
Presuming good faith here, faking recordings has been harder to do, easier to detect, and less equivocal in the past than it is now. If it takes an FX house to generate a plausible recording of me saying something I didn't say, that's a risky enterprise with a lot of witnesses. If my enemy can do it in their basement with an hour of research, the exposure risk goes way down, and consequently the expectation you'll see it in real life goes way up.
- deleted 2y ago
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ceejayoz 2y ago
Nuclear weapons require nation-state levels of resources. Now imagine you can build one in your basement for $10k. Does that change things at all?
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  I understand what you are saying, but my point is that I could make plausible sounding recordings that did not reflect reality by, for example, cutting recordings up with freeware like Audacity, or even using a consumer level double tapedeck before that. It wasn't Manhattan project levels of effort before this. This seems more like people losing their minds over 3d printed guns, when hobbyists with a drill press have been making guns in the garage for decades. Yeah, its easier now to fake voice, but its not as if what this article warns against wasn't possible before the latest AI hype cycle. And it is also worth noting that voice cloning/changing technology is not particularly new either (I've been able to sound like Morgan Freeman using a phone app for at least half a decade). I agree that courts should be cautious around accepting voice recording evidence, I just don't think that the ability to do this is new.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    > I could make plausible sounding recordings that did not reflect reality by, for example, cutting recordings up with freeware like Audacity, or even using a consumer level double tapedeck before that. Sure, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn managed to get quite a bit of nuclear material. Being able to do it at scale, convincingly, in real-time, for any arbitrary text, with just 30s or so of someone's voice as a sample, changes the calculus a lot.
  - Majromax 2y ago
    > I could make plausible sounding recordings that did not reflect reality by, for example, cutting recordings up with freeware like Audacity, Cutting up what recordings, exactly? If you're mixing-and-matching, you need a pretty broad corpus of source material with fairly consistent recording quality (background noise, etc), and even still you're limited to reproducing words that are already present. You can't cut-and-splice together a recording of me saying 'Yes, dghlsakjg, I embezzled $1 million and blew it on the ponies' because there will be no recording of me saying your username, 'embezzled', or 'ponies.' The problem comes with the voice-cloning technology that can construct entirely new sentences based on relatively short voice profile samples. > I've been able to sound like Morgan Freeman using a phone app for at least half a decade You've been able to sound like Morgan Freeman because of specific, hard tuning work put into the voice changer. Now, you can sound like your boss, or your neighbour, or your ex.

gdulli 2y ago

"We've had projectile murder for centuries with arrows, how are these machine guns and missiles any different?"

rout39574 2y ago

Presuming good faith here, faking recordings has been harder to do, easier to detect, and less equivocal in the past than it is now. If it takes an FX house to generate a plausible recording of me saying something I didn't say, that's a risky enterprise with a lot of witnesses. If my enemy can do it in their basement with an hour of research, the exposure risk goes way down, and consequently the expectation you'll see it in real life goes way up.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ceejayoz 2y ago

Nuclear weapons require nation-state levels of resources. Now imagine you can build one in your basement for $10k. Does that change things at all?

dghlsakjg 2y ago
I understand what you are saying, but my point is that I could make plausible sounding recordings that did not reflect reality by, for example, cutting recordings up with freeware like Audacity, or even using a consumer level double tapedeck before that. It wasn't Manhattan project levels of effort before this. This seems more like people losing their minds over 3d printed guns, when hobbyists with a drill press have been making guns in the garage for decades. Yeah, its easier now to fake voice, but its not as if what this article warns against wasn't possible before the latest AI hype cycle. And it is also worth noting that voice cloning/changing technology is not particularly new either (I've been able to sound like Morgan Freeman using a phone app for at least half a decade). I agree that courts should be cautious around accepting voice recording evidence, I just don't think that the ability to do this is new.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > I could make plausible sounding recordings that did not reflect reality by, for example, cutting recordings up with freeware like Audacity, or even using a consumer level double tapedeck before that. Sure, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn managed to get quite a bit of nuclear material. Being able to do it at scale, convincingly, in real-time, for any arbitrary text, with just 30s or so of someone's voice as a sample, changes the calculus a lot.
- Majromax 2y ago
  > I could make plausible sounding recordings that did not reflect reality by, for example, cutting recordings up with freeware like Audacity, Cutting up what recordings, exactly? If you're mixing-and-matching, you need a pretty broad corpus of source material with fairly consistent recording quality (background noise, etc), and even still you're limited to reproducing words that are already present. You can't cut-and-splice together a recording of me saying 'Yes, dghlsakjg, I embezzled $1 million and blew it on the ponies' because there will be no recording of me saying your username, 'embezzled', or 'ponies.' The problem comes with the voice-cloning technology that can construct entirely new sentences based on relatively short voice profile samples. > I've been able to sound like Morgan Freeman using a phone app for at least half a decade You've been able to sound like Morgan Freeman because of specific, hard tuning work put into the voice changer. Now, you can sound like your boss, or your neighbour, or your ex.