Meta announced a new AI model called Voicebox yesterday, one it says is the most versatile yet for speech generation, but it’s not releasing it yet: The model is still only a research project, but Meta says can generate speech in six languages from samples as short as two seconds and could be used for “natural, authentic” translation in the future, among other things.
So creating a text-based AI that impersonates influencers or celebrities is a “cool feature” to “increase engagement” and is totally viable to release to the public, but doing the (checks notes) same thing using voice is incredibly “dangerous” and needs to be protected?
Well snarked, especially enjoyed the copypaste of the checking notes phenomena. Can you figure out why one would be seen as more harmful in the immediate future than the other?
People understand that text can be fake.
People don’t really understand that voices can be. It’s opening up a lot of scams with people pretending to be kidnapped (or otherwise desperate) relatives and taking money from people. If you make it easier to automate that without the human in play and have it appear responsive? A lot more is going to happen a lot more convincingly.
I don’t at all believe Facebook cares about that, but it is a real downside to the tech.