Posted on 09/05/2019 10:31:14 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
Voice mimicking software imitated a company executive’s speech and tricked an employee into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to a secret account, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The managing director of a British energy company, believing that his boss was on the phone, wired more than $240,000 to an account in Hungary this March, French insurance company Euler Hermes told the outlet.
The insurer declined to name the company.
The managing director told the Post in an email that the request was “rather strange,” but the voice was lifelike to the point that he felt he had no choice but to fulfill the request.
Voice synthesis software is an increasing threat to anything that relies on traditional communication, from business deals to discussions between lawmakers.
SNIP
It’s a threat to those who are this stupid.
Two factor authentication for any transaction of sufficient value that you’d be pissed if you were cheated.
How long until we have a “recording of a politician” using this technology making statements that will kill their election chances?
I’m surprised a “Trump tape” hasn’t appeared already.
I remember in the ‘80s being a restaurant manager and getting a police warning - these con artists would come into a place where a new assistant manager was working late at night with a dolly saying “We’re here to pick up the video game for repair.”
What I find more interesting is the possibility to clone, with some slight variation, the vocal qualities of say, Sinatra. You may not be making a copyright violation if you train some AI system to replicate or “nearly” replicate all the qualities of his voice - from, say, the 1940’s. Unfortunately, the trends in popular music are away from artistry like that, but it raises some interesting possibilities. For instance, Sinatra’s son said in an interview that someone wrote a song that Frank Sinatra wanted to sing as a duet with Ella Fitzgerald. Unfortunately, Sinatra had trouble learning new material in his final years and Fitzgerald had health problems, and the recording never happened. Maybe that could be created synthetically with this kind of technology.
Similarly, people who are unable to speak, due to a disease process (esophageal cancer, Lou Gehrig’s disease, etc.) could have a voice synthesizer that matches their former voice.
So, it’s a mixed bag.
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