Using AI to detect AI-generated deepfakes can work for audio — but not always
By Huo Jingnan
Artificial intelligence is supercharging audio deepfakes, with alarm bells ringing in areas from politics to financial fraud.
The federal government has banned robocalls using voices generated by AI and is offering a cash prize for solutions to mitigate harms from voice cloning frauds. At the same time, researchers and the private sector are racing to develop software to detect voice clones, with companies often marketing them as fraud-detection tools...
“If we label a real audio as fake, let’s say, in a political context, what does that mean for the world? We lose trust in everything,” says Sarah Barrington, an AI and forensics researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
“And if we label fake audios as real, then the same thing applies. We can get anyone to do or say anything and completely distort the discourse of what the truth is...”
Sarah Barrington is a Ph.D. candidate at the I School, advised by Professor Hany Farid. She graduated from the MIMS degree program in 2023.
