As text-to-speech artificial intelligence advances, so does voice cloning technology. The prospects may be bright, but from the FTC’s perspective, voice cloning also poses serious consumer protection concerns. The Federal Trade Commission is committed to using a variety of tools to prevent harm to the public. That’s why the just-announced Voice Cloning Challenge is coming.
While voice cloning technology has given hope to some, such as those who have lost their voices due to accident or illness, the Federal Trade Commission has called attention to the ways fraudsters are adding artificial intelligence to their schemes. You may have heard of family emergency scams, in which a person receives a call from a purportedly panicked relative who is in jail or hospitalized and needs money immediately. Until recently, scammers had to come up with excuses as to why something didn’t sound right. But enter artificial intelligence, and a scammer on the other end can use voice-replication technology to impersonate a family member.
This will be the FTC’s fifth challenge under the U.S. Competition Act, which allows agencies to initiate challenges to promote technology development and innovation. For example, other challenges spurred the creation of new tools to reduce illegal robocalls and address security vulnerabilities associated with IoT devices. Submit your best ways to protect people from harm caused by misuse of AI voice cloning—from imposter fraud to stealing someone’s voice to create music. The top prize for the Voice Clone Challenge is $25,000. Please read the FTC Voice Clone Challenge page to learn more about participating.
We will begin accepting submissions on January 2, 2024. But now it’s time for the geniuses to start thinking about potential solutions at various intervention points, including:
- Prevention or authentication, including restricting the use of voice copying software by authorized users;
- Detection and monitoring to alert consumers if their voice has been cloned without their knowledge or if they are speaking to a cloned voice, and/or to block calls using cloned voices; and
- An assessment resource, system or tool that helps a consumer or business check whether an audio clip contains copied sound.
These are just a few possibilities, but to quote Thomas Edison, “There is a way to do it better. Find it now.”
