Jennifer DeStefano tells US Senate about dangers of artificial technology after receiving phone call from scammers sounding exactly like her daughter
After being scammed into thinking her daughter was kidnapped, an Arizona woman testified in the US Senate about the dangers side of artificial intelligence technology when in the hands of criminals.
This is an excellent idea, I am going to discuss that with the family. My dad gets phished constantly, he's pretty savvy but he also has early dementia, so between that and AI, it's going to get harder in the future.
I've only been thinking about the implications of faking a celebrity's voice - personalizing it like this makes me sick to my stomach. Had no idea it's already that easy. I don't think the voice would even have to be that realistic - if they're faking a life threatening situation, my first thought isn't going to be "Hey, their voice sounded a little off". Absolutely horrifying.
Is no one questioning how the alleged kidnappers managed to create a voice profile from a random 15 year old girl to create such a convincing AI voice? The only source that claims that this was potentially an AI scam, was in fact just another parent:
But another parent with her informed her police were aware of AI scams like these.
Isn't it more likely that dad & daughter did this and it backfired?
It's pretty easy to create voice clones, now. As long as you tailor the speech you want it to speak and don't have it speak too long it can get pretty good even with very little input
Given the prevalence of social media platforms where you post videos of yourself, it seems pretty easy to get enough voice sampling to generate a convincing clone. Depending on how much personal info she and her family members put out on social media, it's trivial to connect all the dots to concoct a plausible scenario to scam someone.
Now whether or not it was "just a prank, bro" from family or whomever, I don't know.
My grandma fell for a scammer that was pretending to be one of her grandchildren stuck in a jail in Mexico over a mixup. No AI voice or anything, just an actor and a vulnerable 90+ year old woman. She sent the scammer $10,000. I cannot fucking begin to imagine what AI is going to do to the scamming industry.
A similar thing happened to me and my husband. We were out of state on vacation, and got a call and visit from the police at 3 am saying that my husband had been kidnapped for ransom. Of course he was laying right next to me, but for half a second I was terrified. It was a complete scam. They think they found my husband's information in a data hack at his school.
Teach your grandparents about those scams. Insists on the "nowadays a computer can replicate a voice perfectly enough over the phone, it will really sounds like real" as well as the "the numéro that will call will look like it's from me. Just hang up and call me of you receive such a call"