ElevenLabs, an AI startup that offers voice cloning services with its tools, has banned the user that created an audio deepfake of Joe Biden used in an attempt to disrupt the elections, according to Bloomberg. The audio impersonating the president was used in a robocall that went out to some voters in New Hampshire last week, telling them not to vote in their state's primary. It initially wasn't clear what technology was used to copy Biden's voice, but a thorough analysis by security company Pindrop showed that the perpetrators used ElevanLabs' tools. The security firm removed the background noise and cleaned the robocall's audio before comparing it to samples from more than 120 voice synthesis technologies used to generate deepfakes. Pindrop CEO Vijay Balasubramaniyan told Wired that it "came back well north of 99 percent that it was ElevenLabs."

Last week, some voters in New Hampshire received an AI-generated robocall impersonating President Biden, telling them not to vote in the state's primary election. It's not clear who was responsible for the call, but two separate teams of audio experts tell WIRED it was likely created using technology from voice-cloning startup ElevenLabs. ElevenLabs markets its AI tools for uses like audiobooks and video games; it recently achieved "unicorn" status by raising 80 million at a 1.1 billion valuation in a new funding round co-led by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Anyone can sign up for the company's paid service and clone a voice from an audio sample. The company's safety policy says it is best to obtain someone's permission before cloning their voice, but that permissionless cloning can be OK for a variety of non-commercial purposes, including "political speech contributing to public debates." ElevenLabs did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Criminals are taking advantage of AI technology to conduct misinformation campaigns, commit fraud and obstruct justice through deepfake audio and video. While some uses of deepfakes are lighthearted like the pope donning a white Balenciaga puffer jacket or an AI-generated song using vocals from Drake and The Weeknd, they can also sow doubt about the authenticity of legitimate audio and videos. Criminals are taking advantage of the technology to conduct misinformation campaigns, commit fraud and obstruct justice. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, so does the proliferation of fake content that experts warn could pose a serious threat to various aspects of everyday life if proper controls aren't put in place. AI-manipulated images, videos and audio known as "deepfakes" are often used to create convincing but false representations of people and events.

Insurance company Lemonade requires customers making claims to upload a video explaining their loss. But when the upstart insurer earlier this year said on Twitter that artificial intelligence analyzes these videos for "non-verbal cues" that may suggest fraud, the company received a barrage of angry messages on social media. "There's a wide range of possible uses of digital technologies in the space," says Luke Stark, who studies the ethical and social impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning as an assistant professor at Western University in London, Ontario. "They range from the plausibly occasionally useful-but-problematic to the doesn't-work-at-all and problematic." The Lemonade episode highlights both corporate America's growing investment in detecting lying and deception and the potential backlash when details of such technology become public.

When Roadrunner, a documentary about late TV chef and traveler Anthony Bourdain, opened in theaters last month, its director, Morgan Neville, spiced up promotional interviews with an unconventional disclosure for a documentarian. Some words viewers hear Bourdain speak in the film were faked by artificial intelligence software used to mimic the star's voice. Accusations from Bourdain fans that Neville had acted unethically quickly came to dominate coverage of the film. Despite that attention, how much of the fake Bourdain's voice is in the two-hour movie, and what it said, has been unclear--until now. In an interview that made his film infamous, Neville told The New Yorker that he had generated three fake Bourdain clips with the permission of his estate, all from words the chef had written or said but that were not available as audio.

The new method of criminals in the cyber world is the sound cloning process using artificial intelligence. Audio copies are used for fraud. Especially, the theft of the top executives of the companies has been cloned and theft has increased. The new fraud method of cybercriminals is frauds using artificially cloned sounds. Experts say that along with voice cloning, their voices are no longer safe.

A company that specializes in detecting voice fraud is sounding the alarm over an emerging threat. With the help of AI-powered software, cybercriminals are starting to clone people's voices to commit scams, according to Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop. "We've seen only a handful of cases, but the amount of money stolen can reach as high as $17 million," he told PCMag. During a presentation at RSA, Balasubramaniyan said Pindrop has over the past year also investigated about a dozen similar cases involving fraudsters using AI-powered software to "deepfake" someone's voice to perpetrate their scams. "We're starting to see deepfake audios emerge as a way to target particular speakers, especially if you're the CEO of a company, and you have a lot of YouTube content out there," he said.

Any business in its right mind should be painfully aware of how much money they could bleed via skillful Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams, where fraudsters convincingly forge emails, invoices, contracts and letters to socially engineer the people who hold the purse strings. And any human in their right mind should be at least a little freaked out by how easy it now is to churn out convincing deepfake videos – including, say, of you, cast in an adult movie, or of your CEO saying things that… well, they would simply never say. Well, welcome to a hybrid version of those hoodwinks: deepfake audio, which was recently used in what's considered to be the first known case of an AI-generated voice of a CEO to bilk a UK-based energy firm out of €220,000 (USD $243,000). The Wall Street Journal reports that some time in March, the British CEO thought he had gotten a call from the CEO of his business's parent company, which is based in Germany. Whoever placed the call sounded legitimate.

AI was definitely the dominant theme at CES this week. According to a keynote from LG's president and CTO, Dr. I.P. Park, this technology is "an opportunity of our lifetime to open the next chapter in … human progress." But then again, AI really is becoming pervasive. Consider that Amazon.com recently announced that more than 100 million Alexa devices have been sold. OK then, for CES – which, by the way, had about 180,000 attendees and more than 2.9 million net square feet of exhibit space in Las Vegas -- what were some of the standout innovations?

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI), there is no shortage of hot air and hype. Note that many companies are trying to get a piece of the digital gold rush (similar to what we witnessed during the dot-com boom). Yet despite all this, there is true innovation occurring in AI. In fact, some of the new technologies are draw-dropping. The fact is that AI is experiencing an acceleration of progress.