I cloned my own voice to prank a friend, and… Wow, it was a gut-dropping moment when I understood just how dangerous this tool is for precisely this type of scam.
It’s one thing to hear about it, but to actual experience it… Terrifying.
Mind sharing more info about the prank? Sounds like an interesting story
Oh, it was nothing more than just showing off the technology, really. It wasn’t a committed bit.
I cloned my voice then left a voicemail that said something like: “hey buddy it’s me. My car broke down and I’m at… Actually I don’t know where I’m at. I walked to the gas station and borrowed this guy’s phone. He said he’ll give me a ride into to town if I can get him $50 bucks. Could you venmo it to him at @franks_diner? I’ll get you back as soon as I can find my phone. … By the way this is really me, definitely not a bot pretending to be me.”
We neeeed a guide 👋
Check out ElevenLabs.
Do you guys remember when the T-1000 did this?
Good luck criminals. I ignore nearly every call.
Anyone know how many hours of training data it takes to build up a convincing model of someone’s voice? It was 10’s of hours when I did a bit of research a year ago… the article says social media is the likely source of training data for these scams, but that seems unlikely at this point.
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The technology has clearly come a long way in a short time, really fascinating.
I remember the first examples I read about being trained with celebrity read audiobooks because they needed so much audio data. I want to say Tom Hanks or Anthony Hopkins but I could have that confused with something else.
A current state of the art ai model from Microsoft can achieve acceptable quality with about 3 seconds of audio. Commercially available stuff like eleven labs about 30 minutes. But quality will obviously vary heavily but then again they’re using a low quality phone call so maybe not that important
That’s downright scary :-) I think it took longer in the last Mission Impossible.
30 minutes is still pretty minimal for the kind of targeted attack it sounds like this is used for. I suppose we all need to work with our families on code words or something.
I went in thinking the article was a bit alarmist, but that’s clearly not the case. Thank for the insight.
With that little, they may be able to recreate the timbre of someone’s voice, but speech carries a multitude of other identifiers and idiosyncrasies that they’re unlikely to get with that little audio, like personal vocabulary (we don’t choose the same words and phrasings for things), specific pronunciations (e.g. “library” vs “libary”), voice inflections, etc. Obviously, the more training data you have, the better the output.
TorToiSe can work off of just three ten second clips when you’re using a pre-trained model. No telling if that’ll sound any good.
I’ll have to check that out, thanks for the link.
BADONK!
Whomever is stupid enough to think that Tom Hanks is calling you personally probably needs a court appointed guardian.
Did you read the article? It’s talking about taking kids voices from TikTok and shit. Social media. People have been posting videos of themselves talking for years. That’s enough data to train an ai to leave a message saying, “mom, I lost my phone and I’m in trouble. I need some money.” Or something of that sort. It’s been happening for a long time. This is only making it more confincing
enough data
To be clear, about three seconds of your voice is “enough”.
The reference of the entire article is talking about scammers using AI models of voice you know and understand. None of these scam rings have the time to break it down to your family.
You sure? It’s very easy for these scammers to make a bot to trawl those “address/people lookup” sites, get family names and numbers, and then search for anyone in there’s public social media, and compile that footage. It wouldn’t be much work at all after creating the bot. Those creepy people lookup sites list an absurd amount of information. It would make doing this very easy. And think of how much work already goes into scams that use sheer numbers to boost likelihood of working with a basic ruse. If they can trim that list of available phone numbers down to—even if it were just 30%, or 15% of available phone numbers now with personal information and an in by imitating someone they know and love? That’s still a fuck load of people. And the likelihood of success would shoot WAY up while actually cutting down on the amount of work they’d need to do. So I’d argue you have that backwards.
Unless you actually know Tom Hanks personally and are expecting a call from him, of course.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
