Sam Altman – Credit Chen Galili
OpenAI, the controversial artificial intelligence company run by Sam Altman, introduced a new feature that can recreate someone’s voice. What could go wrong with that?
The new service is not fully functional yet. However, OpenAI revealed preliminary insights and results from a small-scale preview of the new model called Voice Engine, which uses text input and a single 15-second audio sample to “generate natural-sounding speech that closely resembles the original speaker.”
“It is notable that a small model with a single 15-second sample can create emotive and realistic voices,” said the company.
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Just think of the possibilities: A teenager gets in trouble at school and his teacher calls home, what can he do to avoid being punished? Well, just turn on OpenAI and use it to mimic your father or your mother’s voice, that’s what.
Need to close a business deal quickly but the other guy insists on speaking to your boss first who is, unfortunately unavailable? No problem! Just be sure to have recorded his voice ahead of time to get OpenAI to pretend to be him talking on the phone.
OpenAI, however, does acknowledge the problem. The company said in a blog post, “we are taking a cautious and informed approach to a broader release due to the potential for synthetic voice misuse. We hope to start a dialogue on the responsible deployment of synthetic voices, and how society can adapt to these new capabilities. Based on these conversations and the results of these small scale tests, we will make a more informed decision about whether and how to deploy this technology at scale.”
The company added that it started privately testing it with a “small group of trusted partners” to “better understand the potential uses of this technology.”
It also said that it believes any broad deployment of synthetic voice technology should be accompanied by voice authentication experiences that verify that the original speaker is knowingly adding their voice to the service and a no-go voice list that detects and prevents the creation of voices that are too similar to prominent figures.
However, OpenAI did not say how this can be done. And with all new technologies, once the cat is out of the box you will never get it back in.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research and implementation organization based in the United States. It was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and several others. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all humanity.
Sam Altman has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine and one of the “Best Young Entrepreneurs in Technology” by Businessweek. He is also the founder of the Long Term Future Fund, a venture capital fund that invests in companies working to solve long-term problems like climate change and pandemics.
