What could ‘voice cloning’ technology mean for society? - BBC News

in January a company called 11 Labs

released a trial version of its AI

translation software intended for

dubbing movies it went viral but not in

the way they'd hoped

James Clayton picks up the story yo boys

I may need some help I found a room with

a bunch of mob spawners you ever

wondered what it would be like to be

someone else with 11 Labs AI technology

you can find out given a minute of

anyone's voice the software can quickly

put together an imitation within days

people were imitating celebrity voices

making them say things they never said I

just think I would love to get ratitude

Ratatouille like have a little guy up

there excuse me you know making me cook

delicious meals this is the point where

I tell you that you're actually

listening to an AI voice but it wasn't

exactly the most convincing voice this

is it testing out my voice clone I don't

think it sounds like me that much but

what do you think

I'm gonna record here too just to you

know to have them have them all my

producer Ben and I spoke to the CEO and

co-founder of 11 Labs Matty stanachevski

for the company's first broadcast

interview so what's so I had a go at

mimicking my own voice

and you know it was sort of reasonably

successful although it seemed to have a

bit of an Australian accent majority of

our work is based on on public domain uh

data uh where majority of the the voices

and the work that we have actually uh us

uh American accents so if Ben did it it

might be more successful

Ben should definitely try it the

company's terms and conditions are clear

that you could only clone your own voice

but not everyone has abided by its rules

on sites like 4chan it's incredibly easy

to find people who've taken celebrity

voices and made them say racist and

hateful things

11 Labs accepts its platform has been

used for hate speech you know 99 of

content is that kind of positive scene

that we've seen and for less than one

percent of what was generated it was

usually against against terms of service

whether it was uh hate speech or uh or

variations of that the company says only

paid users can clone voices now and

they're developing a new tool to track

down people abusing its platform but 11

Labs doesn't just do cloned voices oh

just give me a second the company has

another tool where users can create a

unique voice completely from scratch

let's use a female gender I'm gonna do a

middle age and I think even more fitting

was a British accent and I'm just gonna

click generate that's going to create

that entirely new voice that doesn't

exist

[Music]

first live public broadcast was made

from the factory of Marconi's Wireless

Telegraph company in Chelmsford

it's never been easier to imitate a

politician's voice

sleepy Joe you have run this country to

its absolute ground well at least I do

run sometimes if you know what I mean

Mark knitsberg is a professor at UC

Berkeley's AI research lab I asked him

whether we should be worried about the

presidential elections in 2024. we'll

very likely see you know many more deep

fakes than we did in the last cycle just

because it's so much simpler

uh and I'm not sure what measures we are

taking to counter what effect that might

have there are plenty of other concerns

around this Tech too for example scams

this could make them far more believable

and far easier to execute the Federal

Trade Commission put out a statement in

March warning people that scams

imitating relatives can now be

incredibly convincing 11 Labs themselves

say that as AI develops people are

simply going to have to learn to trust

voices they hear and things that they

see less and kind of The Wider education

is just making sure that people across

know that as we think about audios we

think about text as we think about

images a lot of the content has been

created is likely or could be AI

generated and and it's important to know

that this might be this might be the

case you know one needs to again take

this approach where we think about what

we want in a society before we

allow the the release of these tools

voice cloning for the public is here to

stay it's very difficult to see how this

is going to be put back in its box now

but this is clearly disruptive

technology that can be used for both

good and bad