FBI recommends coming up with a 'secret word or phrase' to make sure your family know you're you and not some hellish AI copycat

SoftwareAIFBI recommends coming up with a ‘secret word or phrase’ to make sure your family know you’re you and not some hellish AI copycatWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Debalina Ghosh via Getty Images)

An image of a smartphone screen displaying voice cloning using artificial intelligence in progress.

Imagine a situation where someone phones an elderly relative and it appears to be a favourite grandchild on the call, begging for money to help out in an emergency. It sounds exactly like the child and the problem really sounds urgent; what should they do? The FBI suggests they might want to say something like “What does the donkey say to the aardvark?”

Despite rapid advances, the accuracy of generative AI in making images and videos is still far off the mark at times, but voice reproduction is already remarkably good. With the use of vocal cloning on the rise, to carry out scams and fraudulent claims, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation hasissued a list of tips(viaArs Technica) to help protect yourself, including the advice that you should create a secret word or phrase that only you and your family know.

Vocal cloning is a process where various audio clips of a person speaking are used to train a generative AI model so that it can then be used to replicate that person’s normal speech patterns, tone, timbre, and so on. For example, it was used to createGoogle’s ‘podcast hosts’ for its NotebookLM systemand one would be hard-pressed to identify that it’s not real people speaking when you listen to it.

One doesn’t need to be an expert in AI to see how such a thing can be misused for nefarious purposes. And even though one would need genuine clips of your voice and speech mannerisms to clone you, it does mean there is a chance that someone out there could attempt to use ‘you’ in order to carry off a scam of some kind.

Asking “What does the donkey say to the aardvark?” might seem like the opening line to a joke but if you’re expecting “Wednesday afternoon, in Nepal” as a reply, few generative systems are going to offer that reply. So when youdon’tget that response, you can be immediately suspicious as to the genuineness of the call.

It’s not a foolproof system to catch an AI scam, as it does require all parties involved to remember the password, and the correct response, and be able to do it at a moment’s notice. If my mother suddenly asked me about donkeys and aardvarks out of the blue, I think my first response would be ‘Err…what?’ and then the phone would get slammed down, every time.

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And then there are the situations where it’s not a family member on the phone, but the boss or your manager of the company you work for. Is one expected to have a unique password for everyone there, to ensure the business never falls for a scam?

AI, explained(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.

AI, explained

(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.

(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.

What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.

AI voice cloning is arguably a natural extension of the usual email scam, where a higher-up appears to be asking you to send them money or sensitive information—if that person is publicly well-known and clips of them talking can be sourced, such scams would be relatively easy to carry out.

I don’t think there’s any perfect solution to counter any AI voice scam, unfortunately. Even if the top companies in artificial intelligence, such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft integrate systems that always make it obvious that it’s an AI ‘talking’ and not a real person, there will always be people out there who are able to create a similar model that doesn’t.

Hopefully, smarter folks than me are working on solving this thorny problem.

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