From The Washington Post
AI is spawning a flood of fake Trump and Harris voices. Here’s how to tell what’s real
By Pranshu Verma, Rekha Tenjarla, and Bishop Sand
Artificial intelligence has made it extraordinarily simple to copy someone’s voice — allowing thousands of audio impersonations, known as “deepfakes,” to flood the internet since early last year.
With a razor-thin margin in the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, experts are preparing to counter fabricated audio that could confuse voters in the hectic days leading up to the election. Already, Harris has been spoofed celebrating President Joe Biden’s decision to bow out of the 2024 campaign, and Trump’s voice has been cloned insulting the intelligence of Fox News viewers.
The Washington Post spoke with computer scientists, AI audio companies and linguistic experts to find out why AI audio fakes sound so realistic — and how to tell whether the speech is real...
By analyzing very large datasets, AI models have gotten vastly better at mimicking speech, according to Sarah Barrington, an AI researcher at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information. Earlier models would produce robotic speech, but now “the cadence is pretty good,” she added. “It’s as though you’re speaking to a human...”
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.
