We all remember those old scenes from Terminator 1 and 2 in which the Terminators clone voices to locate their targets. But this ability is no longer exclusive to killer robots from the future. If you want to achieve a similar effect, you just need to visit the Lyrebird platform, create an account, and share a sample of your voice with its artificial intelligence.
In July last year we talked about a University of Washington project that uses neural networks to generate lip movements and essentially invent videos. Earlier this year, the FakeApp application took the Web by storm. A person's face can end up inserted into almost any video with just 200 or 300 photos, and clips of famous actresses in adult content multiplied. A trained eye has no trouble detecting errors and defects, but the point is that artificial intelligences don't sleep. With each training session they get more polished results, and it's a matter of time before those errors disappear or are reduced to an imperceptible level. Now, if we can generate lip movements and insert faces into videos, what about the voice? Well...
… the truth is we have things like Lyrebird, a platform developed by a team of just ten members that can clone any voice that passes through its system. The video in which we see Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance is telling: with one minute of audio, Lyrebird's artificial intelligence created a convincing clone, to such an extent that Vance managed to hold a fake conversation with his mother. I imagine that the natural distortion of a mobile call helps mask significant differences, but at Lyrebird they indicate that voice quality can be optimized by making longer recordings (several hours) and using high-fidelity equipment.
Needless to say, the ethical challenge is enormous. Lyrebird creators believe that by openly presenting their technology, the public will be informed, and consequently more cautious. The platform also has some restrictions: you need to create an account before using it, its web version supports one-minute recordings, it is currently limited to the English language, and everything seems to indicate that advanced access won't be free… but if they could do it, there's no doubt someone else will manage to "clone the cloner".
