OpenAI previewed samples from its Voice Engine, an AI model that can clone a person’s voice based on a mere 15 second sample.
Open AI hasn’t made its Voice Engine publicly available due to safety concerns. It takes little imagination to see how it might be used for deepfakes and outright fraud.
Here’s what OpenAI said on its blog: “We first developed Voice Engine in late 2022, and have used it to power the preset voices available in the text-to-speech API as well as ChatGPT Voice and Read Aloud. At the same time, 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.”
Of course, there will be beneficial uses of the technology, such as for people with disabilities. But the malevolent uses of AI synthetic voice capability are worrisome.