AI voices are hard to spot even if you know audio might be a deepfake

Could you tell if you were listening to an AI-generated voice? Even when people know they may be listening to AI-generated speech, it is still difficult for both English and Mandarin speakers to reliably detect a deepfake voice. That means billions of people who understand the world's most spoken languages are potentially at risk when exposed to deepfake scams or misinformation. Kimberly Mai at University College London and her colleagues challenged more than 500 people to identify speech deepfakes among multiple audio clips. Some clips contained the authentic voice of a female speaker reading generic sentences in either English or Mandarin, while others were deepfakes created by generative AIs trained on female voices.