Forget dead husbands, with this tech, it will be hard to trust anything a politician said. Basically, once they master adding this to video, ANYTHING could be construed against anyone.
Want a video of a politician saying "Hitler was right" to cheering masses? Want a video about a president saying it's time to start Nuclear War One?
We already couldn't trust anything a politician said! But indeed, this is the moral equivalent of how Photoshop has nearly undermined photographic evidence. That leaves video, and it's starting to succumb. Synthetic video AI politician, well, Robert Heinlein wrote _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ in 1966.
It is much harder to look at a photograph now and say for sure it's real. Before photoshop, there were ways of manipulating photos, but they were much harder and did not yield nearly as good results. You can photoshop people into photos they were not originally in, doing things they have never done. Even Trump is having his hands enlarged in photos.
Maybe you're speaking specifically about "evidence" in the legal sense. I can't speak to that. But there are countless examples where you can't (and shouldn't) believe what you see, because it's not real.
Certainly it raises the bar for skepticism, but I can think of relatively few cases where a photoshopped image has driven a news cycle/key event because someone famous/important believed it to be real.
Most doctored images/videos get snuffed out by the media very quickly if they grow viral.
So because you can think of relatively few cases where key figures were duped, it therefore must not be a problem? That hypothesis fails to account for the rest of humanity.
I have a friend who believes in aliens. They showed me a video that someone had put together of "footage". They were seriously showing it to me as evidence, to convince me that they are real, based on this video. I was shocked they were so serious - and having a hard time containing my laughter.
I later found a number of other videos debunking the videos and clips that video was based off of - but my friend still believes in aliens, based on those videos. And this is someone I regularly have "intelligent" conversations with.
This change, the ability to put words in someones mouth, is the next photoshop. And it WILL have consequences to it, good and bad. And we are not prepared for that, as a society - we haven't gotten over photoshop yet.
"Voice recordings are currently considered as strong pieces of evidence in our societies and in particular in jurisdictions of many countries. Our technology questions the validity of such evidence as it allows to easily manipulate audio recordings. This could potentially have dangerous consequences such as misleading diplomats, fraud and more generally any other problem caused by stealing the identity of someone else.
By releasing our technology publicly and making it available to anyone, we want to ensure that there will be no such risks. We hope that everyone will soon be aware that such technology exists and that copying the voice of someone else is possible. More generally, we want to raise attention about the lack of evidence that audio recordings may represent in the near future."
I'm glad the authors addressed this issue pretty forthrightly, but part of me wishes they'd written a bit more about exactly your point. Whether or not recorded speech will continue to be legally binding evidence, I think it's just as important to point out that many people are normally quite happy to take what they hear as solid evidence, especially when it aligns with their prejudices.
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I'm very curious (and perplexed) as to why you have linked a video from elsewhere in this thread with no supporting context regarding its relevance other than "hf".
I was thinking the same when I saw an Adobe demo about a similar product. But then I realize that I have listen voice imitators mocking politicians very accurately.
Maybe having this technology at hand will make everyone realise that we can't trust an audio recording.
The advantage of this method is that you can train on random speech datasets, and then using only a minute or two, find the "voice embedding" of a person, and generate anything with his/her voice. This voice embedding is much like the word2vec word vectors, and have similar arithmetic properties.
Wouldn't you need tons and tons of training data ? Obama, Clinton and Trump are public personalities, so it's easy to have many hours of recording of their voices.
Do you know the voices of your second or third degree relatives? Telephone scams are quite a well organized crime by now in Germany. If they can extend the target audience from elderly people to the general public by this means, they dont really care about some negative contacts.
If they really need a voice sample from a relative they could still impost, with voice or not, as insurance person, HR or police and acquire it by simple means if they have any idea about the social graph of their victim.
Even better, targeted attacks against a person to collect their voice could involve contacting them for an opinion survey regarding a product, survey, or political opinion they value. Gleaning something like that from social media profiles is fairly easy.
Or 1) planting evidence (no need for extended wire taps, 2) voice recognition software for access control, and 3) nearly any other fraud that will exploit the acceptance/authorization of verbal consent.
If this is anything like adobe's system then you need a fairly extensive library of the target speaking naturally (~20 hours), so to pull off a scam like that you'll want to try and get into alexa, siri, cortana or Google's library and find a heavy user.
But also enabling the next gen of "Mom, I'm in Mexican jail. Quickly wire me $2,000 so I can get out." scams.