In response to the growing use of the voices of celebrities in robocalls, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to ban generative artificial intelligence for voice synthesis as part of telephone marketing campaigns.
Recently, a campaign of fraudulent calls using the sinthetized voice of Joe Biden tried to convince between 5,000 and 25,000 voters in New Hampshire not to vote in the north-eastern state’s primaries. The origin of the campaign is unknown, but the audios with the president’s voice were an algorithmically generated deepfake.
Cloning a voice from a few samples is child’s play. From the first algorithms that required several minutes of reading specific sentences, we have moved on to others that simply need a few seconds of a voice to be able to copy it. In the case of public figures, since it is usually extremely easy to obtain samples of them speaking, campaigns have been found in many cases that aim to use them as a way to generate trust in the interlocutor. By marrying that technology with generative algorithms, we can come up with reasonably convincing conversational algorithms.
In some cases, these calls using cloned voices are being used to trick people into thinking that a family member is in trouble and needs money. Sometimes the intention is to mislead through the recommendation of a product by a famous or influential person, thus saving the brand from having to pay that person for the use of their voice.
The 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) restricts telemarketing calls and the use of automatic telephone dialing systems with artificial or prerecorded voice messages in the United States without the prior consent of the recipient. If, in addition, the use of calls using cloned voices is now prohibited, a reasonable legal framework for such activities would be ensured. Does it make sense to criminalize something that is used by criminals, whose activity is, by definition, outside the law? Obviously, this does not prevent its illegal use, but at the very least, it would facilitate the subsequent prosecution of the crime and the imposition of appropriate penalties.
In any case, it seems like a reasonable move. When a technology like voice cloning is simple and is being used to commit fraud, making its use illegal, even if difficult to apply, seems like a fairly logical way to try to protect consumers from the misuse of that technology.
(En español, aquí)
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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