AI is cool and it is certainly making many of our lives much easier in different ways here and there. However, for a technology as “powerful” as that, it’d be relatively naive to believe that AI would only find itself used for good. It might sound like something out of a fantasy plot, but AI is used for as much bad as it is used for good.
Deepfakes are perhaps the most notable example of how AI is being used maliciously, whether it is faking people’s faces in videos or simply faking their voices. Regardless, Hiya has just introduced a new deepfake-detecting Chrome extension that you can use to keep you safe.
Did He Actually Say That?? Hiya’s Deepfake Detector Will Be Able To Determine If A Voice Is Real Or Not
By this point, you already know how well AI can be used to imitate people’s voices. From those rap songs that sound like the SpongeBob crew is dropping bars to funny videos that make it sound like US presidents are inexplicably playing Minecraft with one another, AI doesn’t have a problem analyzing a person’s voice from available clips and replicating it.
The major problem with this is that for the less discerning among us, such a technology could be used to get someone to “say” something that they never actually said. In fact, it has very clearly been used for this already, and unfortunately, in many cases, people are blissfully unable to spot the signs that what they’re listening to is AI-generated, so they swallow it hook, line, and sinker.
Well, if that’s always been something of a problem for you, you’ll be glad to know that Hiya has brought a solution to that. All it needs is a single second of audio, whether you’re watching a video or listening to an audio stream, and it’ll be able to tell if you’re listening to an actual human voice or one that’s basically an AI clone.
Hiya’s Deepfake Voice Detector Is Available As A Chrome Extension
The best part is that you can get started using this deepfake voice detector right away, as it is available as a Google Chrome extension already. It will also work in other Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge (which I’m using right now). Hopefully, this will help protect people from falling for silly little pranks and scams online.
The United States will be having its presidential election next month, which is arguably the most important election in the world. There’s going to be a lot of campaigning and propaganda and before people find themselves swayed by a viral, yet fake, video that has one of the candidates saying something overwhelmingly controversial, Hiya decided to push its tool out there.
Even outside of these elections, the company was able to find that one in four people has been exposed to an audio deepfake, with most of them saying that deepfake video calls were the source of exposure.
While Hiya’s tool doesn’t currently work for voice calls on your phone, it is still a good start for prevention.
