AI software can create artificial sounds so realistic they fool humans

Artificial intelligence has produced sound so realistic it can fool human ears. Using machine learning, AI learned how to recreate the precise sounds of objects being hit with a drumstick after MIT researchers fed thousands of examples. Human subjects had difficulty distinguishing between the algorithm's sounds and real ones - and actually chose the AI's twice as many times during the online study. MIT researchers fed a massive audiovisual dataset of objects being hit with a drumstick to their AI, which detected patterns in the sounds and learned how to recreate each one. Although there are limitations, human subjects had difficulty distinguishing between the algorithm's sounds and real ones In order to train this sound-producing algorithm, MIT needed to feed it sounds to learn. About 1,000 videos with an estimated 46,000 sounds that represent different objects being hit, scraped and prodded with a drumstick were recorded.