The power to use voices generated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing all over the world. However, a new trend has caught the attention of different American media, such as the newspaper ‘The Washington Post’, which recently reviewed different cases where criminals are generating AI-only video calls to defraud users on the Internet.
The American newspaper pointed out that data from the FTC, in 2022 this type of fraud in which someone impersonates another person was the second most frequent, with more than 36,000 complaints from people who were deceived by others who pretended to be friends or relatives. . In 2021, a person managed to steal $35 million from a bank using this technology.
[ Así se verían los superhéroes de Marvel sin cabello, según la inteligencia artificial ]
How does this type of AI crime work?
Advances in artificial intelligence already make it possible to replicate a voice with an audio sample of just a few sentences. Speech generation software analyzes what makes a person’s voice unique (age, gender, or accent), and searches a vast database of voices to find similar voices and predict patterns.
You can then recreate the individual pitch, timbre, and sounds of a person’s voice to create a similar effect. From there, the scammer can say whatever he wants with that voice.
In most cases it is almost impossible to distinguish it, much less when the person making the call does so with a certain urgency. And it is even more complicated for an older person who is unaware of these technologies to realize the danger.
Companies like ElevenLabs, an AI speech synthesis startup, transform a short vocal sample into a synthetically generated voice for a modest price ranging from 5 euros to 300 per month, depending on the audio limit.