Written by Muhammad Ayman

Friday, July 14, 2023 08:00 AM

Deepfakes have gained popularity over the past few years, with several high-profile incidents such as the use of actress Emma Watson’s image in a series of referral ads that appeared on Facebook and Instagram.

There was also a widely shared video from 2022 in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Ukrainians to “lay down their arms,” ​​Metro said.

Now, technology that creates a deep voice, a realistic copy of a person’s voice, is becoming increasingly popular.

To create a realistic version of a person’s voice, you need data to train the algorithm. This means there should be plenty of audio recordings of your intended target’s voice. The more examples of a person’s voice you can feed into the algorithms, the better and more accurate the final version will be.

Many of us already share details of our daily lives online, which means the audio data needed to create a realistic version of sound is readily available on social media.

In practice, it can be as simple as typing in some text and having the computer speak it out loud as if it were your own voice.

This capability risks increasing the spread of audio disinformation and, as seen in Zelensky’s “videos,” attempts to influence international or national public opinion.

But the widespread nature and availability of these technologies also pose significant challenges at the local level – especially with the growing trend of “AI scam calls”, many people will receive a scam message or a phishing call, for example, our computer has been hacked and we need to log in immediately, which gives the caller access to our data. provide.

A recent story reported by CNN highlights an incident where a man received a call from an unknown number, when he answered the phone, it was his daughter, and the daughter was allegedly kidnapped and called her mother for ransom.