AI-Generated Voice Deep Fakes Aren't Scary Good--Yet

There have been a couple of high-profile incidents in recent years in which cybercriminals have reportedly used voice deepfakes of company CEOs in attempts to steal large amounts of money--not to mention that documentarians posthumously created voice deepfakes of Anthony Bourdain. But are criminals at the turning point where any given spam call could contain your sibling's cloned voice desperately seeking "bail money?" No, researchers say--at least not yet. The technology to create convincing, robust voice deepfakes is powerful and increasingly prevalent in controlled settings or situations where extensive recordings of a person's voice are available. At the end of February, Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox published findings that he had recorded five minutes of himself talking and then used a publicly available generative AI service, ElevenLabs, to create voice deepfakes that defeated a bank's voice-authentication system.