A new video featuring Hollywood A-lister Leonardo DiCaprio is going viral on Twitter for eerie reasons. First is how accurately voices of other personalities are dispatched in his speech and the second is, well how accurate they are. Developed by ElevenLabs, a research company exploring frontiers of artificial intelligence (AI), the video was shared by Rundown AI and shows DiCaprio speaking but with voices of several different personalities.
The speech is from 2014 when the actor addressed the United Nations at the opening of the Climate Summit. His famous address is now circulating online but with cloned voices of podcast host, mixed martial artist and MMA commentator Joe Rogan, late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and actors like Robert Downey Jr and even Kim Kardashian.
Voice cloning with AI is getting shocking.
This video by ElevenLabs uses Leonardo DiCaprio’s famous climate change speech and turns it into other cloned actors’ voices.
You can also clone your own voice on their website. pic.twitter.com/7ydSjkyVaT
— The Rundown AI (@TheRundownAI) March 20, 2023
The feature of voice cloning is available on ElevenLabs’ website along with other feature such as generating voices out of texts. The company promises “uncanny quality” and claims “its deep learning model renders human intonation and inflections with unprecedented fidelity and adjusts delivery based on context.”
Not only cloned voices, but the same deep learning method is being used to generate deep fake images of events that haven’t happened yet. One such example is the picture of former US President Donald Trump’s arrest which went viral on social media. Barack Obama’s beach time with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel also went viral thanks to the near-perfect quality.
These Dramatic ass picture of Donald Trump getting arrested LMFAOO pic.twitter.com/5vUHPVkq0z
— joe (@Joeonv) March 21, 2023
US government issues warning over voice cloning
Concerned with the potential fraud that could be carried out using the voice cloning technology, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a warning. In an alert issued on March 20, the FTC said that a scammer can use AI to clone voice of a person’s relatives and extract money by spinning lies about an emergency.
“A scammer could use AI to clone the voice of your loved one. All he needs is a short audio clip of your family member’s voice — which he could get from content posted online — and a voice-cloning program,” the FTC’s official release read. “Don’t trust the voice. Call the person who supposedly contacted you and verify the story. Use a phone number you know is theirs. If you can’t reach your loved one, try to get in touch with them through another family member or their friends,” it further read.
