(WXYZ) — The future is here, and it’s using your voice. There are already apps available where you can use artificial voices, listen to them, or you can make one.
Now some of these voices are pretty familiar: JFK, Barack Obama, Kevin Hart, the list goes on.
"It's pretty scary," said one Shelby Township resident. Adding that she would "absolutely" believe that it was a real person.
Those voices were made using an app called Play.ht. The app can also create clones of voices. It took a couple hours but I created a clone of my own voice.
"We’re at a point in time with artificial intelligence where you can recreate somebody's voice after just having 3 seconds of their audio," said Sinead Bovell, Futurist and WAYE founder.
WAYE is a company which educates on the future of technology. Bovell travels the world to talk about artificial intelligence.
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While Bovell is worried about the technology, she said she feels in some ways we have been here before.
"When the radio was invented, it disrupted so many things and there was a lot of legitimate fear," she said.
As with most all progression, Bovell says there are pros and cons to the artificial intelligence.
Pros: it can be used to give people with disabilities back their ability to speak and make a lot of peoples’ jobs easier when it comes to careers like podcasting and video creation.
Cons: alarm bells have been ringing as to artificial intelligence scams where bad actors have used A.I. voice cloning to pretend to be someone else, threatening them over the phone or attempting to gain access to bank accounts.
"As A.I. becomes more advanced and more pervasive that means things like phone calls and different video segments we may see, we have to think critically about how those were created or who is actually behind them," said Bovell.
She says there is artificial intelligence in the works to let you know if a voice is real or fake.
It’s a bit of a cat and mouse game, but what you can do is call family or friends directly to confirm their identity, come up with a safe word, and be very careful with what phone numbers you pick up for, as well as with who you share your personal information.
Similar to when the internet came out, we all need to educate ourselves, and prepare to adjust.
"Kinda scary but at the same time I think it’s just the advancement of ... the world now," said Imani Jones of Detroit.
Bovell adds, "we really have been here before and we of course will find ways to move through it."
