Via New York Post:
An Arizona mom claims that scammers used AI to clone her daughter’s voice so they could demand a $1 million ransom from her as part of a terrifying new voice scheme.
“I never doubted for one second it was her,” distraught mother Jennifer DeStefano told WKYT while recalling the bone-chilling incident. “That’s the freaky part that really got me to my core.”
This bombshell comes amid a rise in “caller-ID spoofing” schemes, in which scammers claim they’ve taken the recipient’s relative hostage and will harm them if they aren’t paid a specified amount of money.
Fortunately for the family, Jennifer called her daughter before making any payment. The next victims may not be so lucky. People tend not to act entirely rationally in a panic, which could certainly be induced by hearing your child’s voice over the phone in an apparent kidnapping situation.
With even a brief sample, anyone’s voice can be replicated in a few short moments, which would potentially open the door for industrial-scale ransom schemes like this one or new varieties. A lot of Nigerian princes with a fortune to share with lucky internet people are going to be busy in the coming years.
The sky is the limit:
“In the beginning, it would require a larger amount of samples,” explained Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer science professor and AI authority at Arizona State University. “Now there are ways in which you can do this with just three seconds of your voice. Three seconds. And with the three seconds, it can come close to how exactly you sound.
The opportunities for criminality facilitated by AI — whether committed by the state or private actors — are nearly limitless.
I leave you with the apropos prescience of psychonaut Terence McKenna on the coming unreality:
It’s only going to get weirder. The level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. So, I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder, and weirder, and finally it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. And at that point novelty theory can come out of the woods, ah, because eventually people are going to say, “What the hell is going on?” It’s just too nuts, it’s not enough to say it’s nuts, you have to explain why it’s so nuts. So, between now and 2012, the next 14 years, I look for: the invention of artificial life, the cloning of human beings, possible contact with extraterrestrials, possible human immortality, and at the same time, appalling acts of brutality, genocide, race baiting, homophobia, famine, starvation; because the systems which are in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed.
McKenna, like the Mayans, may have missed the mark with the 2012 prediction (never put a hard date on a prediction if possible: the iron rule of prognosticators) and the homophobia (if anything, AI will be programmed to distribute pro-LGBTQ+++™ propaganda), but the thrust of his commentary is spot-on.
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