Are people not aware that AI exists?

Who falls for something like this?

RT:

Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto has declared his voice a “masterpiece,” after discovering that scammers used AI to impersonate him last week in a reported attempt to solicit funds from the country’s wealthiest business people.

Crosetto first alerted the public to the ongoing scam on Thursday in a post on X, warning that several prominent figures had been approached by imposters.

The scammers reportedly aimed to capitalize on a recent high-profile prisoner exchange with Iran, during which Italian journalist Cecilia Sala was released. The AI-generated “Crosetto” claimed urgent funding was needed to pay ransom for other reporters supposedly held in the Middle East, framing it as a matter of national security.

…

Crosetto shared some jokes he was told about the situation, noting a suggestion from a friend that he could take solace in the fact that “fake copies of all masterpieces circulate.”

Yeah, that’s probably funnier in Italian, I would assume.

Original tweet here.

I have a lot of big ideas about the reality collapse. I haven’t written it all in one place, but I’ve been writing bits about it for yearts now. Many news stories are beginning to pop up showing what I’ve been saying is indeed happening.

Basically, the deal is, humans allowed technology to become reality. The first thing was the telephone – talking to someone far away without being able to see them. Then TVs showed global events which you did not personally witness. Then the internet.

Now, all of those technologies that we’ve allowed to serve as stand-ins for physical reality are being increasingly manipulated, to the point where we cannot tell what is real anymore. This is going to continue to get worse and worse.

New York Post:

A California senior citizen was swindled out of $25,000 by scammers using an AI voice mimicking his son to make him believe his loved one was involved in a “horrible accident” and needed money to be bailed out of jail.

The man, identified only as Anthony, said he received a call from who he believed to be his son, saying he had struck a pregnant woman while driving, and she was “rushed to the ICU,” according to ABC 7.

“It was his voice. It was absolutely his voice,” he told the outlet. “There was no doubt about it.”

Los Angeles Police Department detective Chelsea Saeger told ABC 7 that scammers have become “more clever and sophisticated” over recent years.

“They are using social media and technology to craft these very believable and convincing stories, and people really do believe they’re talking to a grandchild or a government official,” Saeger said.

While phone scams are not new, technological advances — specifically in artificial intelligence and number blockers — have opened a new playing field for fraudsters who pray on unsuspecting victims to steal their hard-earned money.

“They call, and when you answer, and it’s a scammer, there’s silence,” Saeger explained.

“They want you to say ‘hello’ or ‘is anybody there?’ All they need is three seconds of your voice to input it into AI and to clone it.”

The detective also said scammers will go through “video posts” on social media as a way for them to capture voices and clone them to use to defraud others.

These scams are mostly done by Indians, and it is completely insane that the US government will not sanction them for this – even whilst they are willing to sanction Africans for not having enough gay sex with underage boys.

You really, really should not trust audio clips anymore

Even a couple months ago, it used to take a commercial service to clone a voice. No more. Here is me creating a voice clone of myself using just a 10 second reference clip on my home computer

This is all real time, no cuts pic.twitter.com/0OlBcMcYbm

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) October 14, 2024

But this is of course bigger than Indian scams. This is rapidly becoming Black Mirror. No one is going to have any idea what is real anymore.

This collapse of reality has long been predicted in science fiction. Philip K. Dick, who was my favorite fiction author when I was a teenager, is perhaps most infamous for this, but I’ve recently been going back through Frank Herbert’s non-Dune books, and Destination: Void and the trilogy that follows it, the Pandora Sequence, deals with these themes in a slightly more organized manner. Both of these writers were German-Irish, but Dick was on too many drugs and totally paranoid.

Though Philip K. Dick was satirical, many of the stories were near-future, and thus sort of almost resembling what is happening now. Herbert did primarily far-future material, where the themes are more allegorical than literal. But a technologically-driven collapse of man’s ability to get a grip on reality is a key theme in their stories as well as many other science fiction stories.

The 2009 film Pandorum doesn’t credit Herbert, but is basically a rip-off of his stories. It’s turned into a horror film, so much of the analogy is lost. It’s still a pretty good movie though.

Cryptography can be used to ensure that the person you’re talking to on the phone is really that person – unless someone gets ahold of their device and uses it to call you. That is much less of a problem than the fact that you cannot believe anything you see in a video is actually real.

More seriously, AI could be used to target you personally and manipulate your internet use in order to give you various false beliefs about the nature of reality. The internet, which we all rely on so much, could be turned into a Skinner Box.

Facebook was infamously caught using algorithms to manipulate people’s emotions long before the modern LLM type of AI was created.

Manipulating your emotions is part of the process, but they could now very easily use Facebook and Google, as well as the AI programs people are using directly now, to manipulate your entire perception of reality.

I have often described my experience with the “Alt Right” as being like the Truman Show, as I eventually realized that all of the major figures in it were working with the feds. It was truly surreal and not something that anyone who hasn’t been in such a situation could ever understand.

But you might understand it soon.

Everyone could end up in that kind of situation, where they are the center of a vast manipulation of their reality, and they have no ability to distinguish what is real.

Probably, it’s time to start meeting with the people you know and care about in real life, and distancing yourself from technology.

This bitch, like all women, should shut up.

You can’t stop the robots.

They are taking your stupid job.

The Guardian:

When she discovered her voice had been uploaded to multiple websites without her consent, the actor Cissy Jones told them to take it down immediately. Some complied. “Others who have more money in their banks basically sent me the email equivalent of a digital middle finger and said: don’t care,” Jones recalls by phone.

“That was the genesis for me to start talking to friends of mine about: listen, how do we do this the right way? How do we understand that the genie is out of the bottle and find a way to be a part of the conversation or we will get systematically annihilated? I know that sounds dramatic but, given how easy it is to steal a person’s voice, it’s not far off the mark.”

I don’t care if it’s dramatic. I care that it’s a horrible sentence.

Cissy Jones.

Much less hot than Andreja. 

Video games are just now being recognized as a story-telling platform, by the way. Breaking news from anti-robot racists at the Guardian.

Jones, 45, a voice artist with credits including Starfield and Baldur’s Gate III, was wrestling with the march of artificial intelligence (AI) into video games, increasingly recognised as less a niche pursuit for bedroom-dwelling teenagers than a storytelling platform with almost unlimited potential. Hollywood actors such as Jodie Comer, Idris Elba, Megan Fox, David Harbour and Keri Russell are contributing their likenesses and voices to the multibillion-dollar industry.

Just as in film and TV, only more so, AI represents a gathering storm for video game actors. Some studios are experimenting with tools that can clone voices, alter voices and generate audio from text. In interactive, multi-choice games, this can generate a potentially endless number of characters and conversations – and is far more efficient than asking performers to record huge quantities of dialogue.

The response from professional actors has been mixed. Some fear that games companies – sensing opportunity to cut costs and accelerate development – would use AI to reproduce their voices without permission or payment, pushing down the value of their work. Others have been willing to give it a try if they are fairly compensated and their voices are not misused.

…

Jones, who is based in Los Angeles and has worked on about 300 games, notes: “It is very easy to steal a person’s voice. At the beginning of 2022 it took six hours. At the beginning of 2023 it took three hours. Do you want to guess what it takes right now? Three seconds. Anything you have on Instagram, TikTok, any YouTube videos, anybody can create a digital version of your voice from just that. Is it perfect? No but the technology is not getting worse.”

Maybe the 3 second version isn’t perfect, but a lot of it is perfect.

I think Larian is using AI for the voices in the updates to BG3. I don’t see how they are calling all these actors and having them record new material every few months when they release an update. It would be part of their contract, and it is probably in their contract that they’re not allowed to complain about it either.

She adds: “The danger is that people can take all of these billions of voices that are available online, scrape the internet for them, mush them together and create a new voice that does not ‘belong’ to anybody, thereby creating a ‘new’ voice. However, they are still profiting off of my voice.

Shut up, bitch.

If you didn’t want people to be profiting off of your voice, you should have been a hooker.

“We’re working on active fingerprinting technology that could parse that out but, as quickly as we’re working on developing that companies are working to erase that. It’s the old network security versus hacker problem. As soon as network security figures out a lock, hackers figure out a way through it.”

Jones also sits on the board of the National Association of Voice Actors (Nava), a non-profit which has a mantra of “consent, compensation and control” around the use of AI and has been in talks with with members of Congress on upcoming AI legislation. “We’ve been working with the Office of Copyright because right now you can copyright your name, image and likeness – you cannot copyright your voice.”

Who cares?

This isn’t my problem, so I don’t care at all.

There are concerns that AI voices could replace all but the most famous human actors and eliminate entire job categories, such as quality-assurance testers or the entry-level positions that allow young performers to get a foot in the door. Some actors worry that they might already have signed their voice away years ago and have no way of claiming it back.

…

The rise of AI seems ominous to Jared Butler, who specialises in imitating celebrity voices and is an “audio double” for Johnny Depp, having vocally portrayed Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Pirates of the Caribbean Online and other media. He says: “I’m kind of the canary in the coalmine for this and this canary is smelling a gas leak.

You must have farted, retard.

Because all I’m smelling is victory.

“There’s no version of this that doesn’t affect how much work I get in my future career. Voice actors are rightly concerned about this technology and how it’s going to impact them. There’s no version this where it doesn’t impact us in some way, and mostly negatively.”

Jared Butler

Butler adds: “I don’t do just voice matching but, as one of the people where that’s my speciality, this affects me directly. The technology has gotten so good so fast that they can and have already replaced a lot of what voice actors do, especially when it comes to imitating the voice. They can just feed the algorithm a bunch of recordings of any voice and imitate it fairly well.

“People think that it all sounds like these bad customer service robots. It’s not like that: I’ve heard the good stuff. As someone who has a critical ear, I’ve spent a career listening to voices intently and trying to match every nuance, and I gotta tell you this technology is scary how accurate it is.”

Oh boy, Jared: I’ve heard the good stuff too.

And damn, is that stuff good.

Breaking: @OpenAI reveals artificial intelligence tool to recreate human voices👀

OpenAI said on Friday it’s allowed a small number of businesses to test a new tool that can recreate a person’s voice from just a 15-second recording.

Why it matters: The company said it is taking… pic.twitter.com/PyaEh4Empg

— MartyParty (@martypartymusic) March 29, 2024

Meanwhile…

NBC:

Artificial intelligence startup OpenAI released a preview Friday of a digital voice generator that it said could produce natural-sounding speech based on a single 15-second audio sample.

The software is called Voice Engine. It’s the latest product to come out of the San Francisco startup that’s also behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E.

The company said in a blog post that it had tested Voice Engine in an array of possible uses, including reading assistance to children, language translation and voice restoration for cancer patients.

Some social media users reacted by highlighting possible misuses, including potential fraud assisted with unauthorized voice imitation, or deepfakes.

But OpenAI said it was holding off for now on a wider release of the software because of the potential for misuse, including during an election year. It said it first developed the product in late 2022 and had been using it behind the scenes in other products.

The big question here is: how is blackmail going to work now?

The entire Jewish domination scheme is based on blackmail, as we saw with Epstein.

If these politicians can just say in court that any video evidence they have of them doing illegal acts is fake, why should they care?

OpenAI has applied for a trademark on the term Voice Engine. JARVIS incoming? pic.twitter.com/8nGDiwVroN

— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) March 22, 2024

AI turns everyone into a Hollywood producer.

Eyyyy.

It finally happened!

I’ve been waiting for like a year for this.

CNN:

A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday.

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK.

“Everyone he saw was fake.”

Remember that.

This is the dawn of a new age.

Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out.

However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said.

Believing everyone else on the call was real, the worker agreed to remit a total of $200 million Hong Kong dollars – about $25.6 million, the police officer added.

The case is one of several recent episodes in which fraudsters are believed to have used deepfake technology to modify publicly available video and other footage to cheat people out of money.

At the press briefing Friday, Hong Kong police said they had made six arrests in connection with such scams.

This has yet to happen in the West.

Chinese are a lot more savvy than most white people at this point. (It’s unfortunate to have to admit that, but the data is all there.) Their criminals are a step ahead. But this will start happening in the West any time now.

The situation, just to clarify: you go on a Zoom video call, and you see your co-workers, but they’re not actually your co-workers, but criminals.

Go ahead and apply that to every other situation.

What could someone do by calling pretending to be your mother? Etc.

We are at the point now where literally everything can be faked, which means that it will be faked, which means that you simply cannot believe anything you are seeing on a screen.

In retrospect, this should have been obvious a long time ago. What we had was this brief period where digital imagery could reflect reality, and now that period is over, and we were back to where we always were at every other point in history: you can only trust your own eyes and the people whose eyes you choose to trust. But in order to trust someone else’s eyes, you have to meet with them in person, because if you just see them on a screen, it could be totally fake.

Of course, encryption still exists, and you still have keys to your accounts, so you can still make sure your personal digital communications are sound. This Hong Kong guy apparently did not do that. Or, it’s possible, the criminals catfished one of the other employees for their login to start the call. Probably, however, it was an insecure channel, and he just assumed it was fine because he was seeing the faces of people he knew.

It’s a new age. The whole world is opening back up again. Digital reality no longer means anything. The government and other interests can just totally fake events now. They were already faking events, frankly. You think about something like the Syrian gas attack, where they used actors to stage the event and then posted it on the internet. Most people still believe that is real, despite statements from the UN inspector involved and several journalists who visited the site claiming that no gassing occurred. It’s pretty easy to explain “no, actually, that video was just professional actors.” It’s not hard to understand. But many people believed it.

Some percentage of people will just prefer to live in a manic fantasy of manufactured reality. But a lot of people are going to say that everything on the screens is bullshit. If you don’t have anyway of proving something is true, then it might as well be fake.

Horrible things are going to happen. But we are also going to have to go back to hard reality. That’s a very good thing.

This is Deep Fake technology!!!

Notice how the faces are changing in the video. The Deep Fake technology is getting better and better, you can’t trust anything on the internet anymore. pic.twitter.com/IuJvEIri2A

— Yavuz (@eCommerceTR) January 27, 2024

Elvis Dunderhoff contributed to this article. 

Our democracy is strong.

But joking around will totally destroy it, so we have to ban people from joking around.

We all need stronger laws against horseplay, quite frankly.

Reuters:

“I actually like Ron DeSantis a lot,” Hillary Clinton reveals in a surprise online endorsement video. “He’s just the kind of guy this country needs, and I really mean that.”

Joe Biden finally lets the mask slip, unleashing a cruel rant at a transgender person. “You will never be a real woman,” the president snarls.

Welcome to America’s 2024 presidential race, where reality is up for grabs.

The Clinton and Biden deepfakes – realistic yet fabricated videos created by AI algorithms trained on copious online footage – are among thousands surfacing on social media, blurring fact and fiction in the polarized world of U.S. politics.

While such synthetic media has been around for several years, it’s been turbocharged over the past year by of a slew of new “generative AI” tools such as Midjourney that make it cheap and easy to create convincing deepfakes, according to Reuters interviews with about two dozen specialists in fields including AI, online misinformation and political activism.

“It’s going to be very difficult for voters to distinguish the real from the fake. And you could just imagine how either Trump supporters or Biden supporters could use this technology to make the opponent look bad,” said Darrell West, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation.

“There could be things that drop right before the election that nobody has a chance to take down.”

Tools that can generate deepfakes are being released with few or imperfect guardrails to prevent harmful misinformation as the tech sector engages in an AI arms race, said Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Human Technology, a nonprofit that studies technology’s impact on society.

Former President Donald Trump, who will vie with DeSantis and others for the Republican nomination to face Biden, himself shared a doctored video of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper earlier this month on his social media platform Truth Social.

“That was President Donald J. Trump ripping us a new asshole here on CNN’s live presidential townhall,” Cooper says in the footage, although the words don’t match his lip movement.

CNN said the video was a deepfake. A representative for Trump didn’t respond to a request for comment on the clip, which was still on his son Donald Jr’s Twitter page this week.

While major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have made efforts to prohibit and remove deepfakes, their effectiveness at policing such content varies.

…

No one is certain where the generative AI road leads or how to effectively guard against its power for mass misinformation, according to the people interviewed.

Here’s the thing: if people are so stupid they can’t figure out what’s real, they should not be voting.

This is a really obvious problem. If people can’t determine the nature of a fake video from a prankster, how could they possibly cut through the bullshit of the normal mainstream media?

They couldn’t.

Democracy is stupid.

Are the American elections at risk with the rise of AI?#WorldNews | #USAhttps://t.co/dxcwO0mLxU

— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) May 30, 2023

VALL-E demo 🤖

Made a quick video about VALL-E, a new speech synthesis (TTS) #AI model by Microsoft. It only requires a 3 second sample to generate audio from text input that is almost indistinguishable from the the speaker’s original voice. 🤯

Try 👉 https://t.co/AaPhHCeKO0 pic.twitter.com/U3aYEajxqc

— René Schulte (@rschu) January 12, 2023

Related:

• Cash-Money Hustler Jordan Peter$on Calls for “Deepfake” Technology to be Banned!
• Chinese Deepfake App ZAO Goes Viral, Everyone is a Movie Star and Video Game Character Now!

This sure is moving fast!

I remember Jordan Peterson having a total breakdown because the AI was able to fake his voice after six hours of him talking.

Well, most people who are not public figures do not have 6 hours of recordings of them talking available.

Everyone has 3 seconds.

Fox News:

Microsoft’s new language model Vall-E is reportedly able to imitate any voice using just a three-second sample recording.

The recently released AI tool was tested on 60,000 hours of English speech data. Researchers said in a paper out of Cornell University that it could replicate the emotions and tone of a speaker.

Those findings were apparently true even when creating a recording of words that the original speaker never actually said.

“Vall-E emerges in-context learning capabilities and can be used to synthesize high-quality personalized speech with only a 3-second enrolled recording of an unseen speaker as an acoustic prompt. Experiment results show that Vall-E significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot [text to speech] system in terms of speech naturalness and speaker similarity,” the authors wrote. “In addition, we find Vall-E could preserve the speaker’s emotion and acoustic environment of the acoustic prompt in synthesis.”

The Vall-E samples shared on GitHub are eerily similar to the speaker prompts, although they range in quality.

Speaking of Jordan Peterson deepfakes – there is going to have to be a round 2 of Jordan Peterson deepfakes.

I don’t want to get sued by that faggot, but it was just too much of an outrage the way he whined about that. You can’t just let a public figure get away with that kind of public whining.

Someone is going to have to build an army of Petersonbots.

I’m sure this is fine.

Breitbart:

Tech giant Amazon has revealed an insanely creepy experimental feature for its AI assistant Alexa that allows it to mimic the voices of its users’ dead relatives.

The Verge reports that Amazon has revealed an experimental feature for its Alexa smart speaker AI assistant that allows the device to mimic the voices of users’ dead relatives. The company displayed this new feature at its annual MARS conference, demoing it by showing a video of a child asking Alexa to read its bedtime story in the voice of a dead grandmother.

Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s head scientist for Alexa AI, commented: “As you saw in this experience, instead of Alexa’s voice reading the book, it’s the kid’s grandma’s voice.” Prasad introduced the clip stating that adding human attributes” to AI systems was becoming increasingly important “in these times of the ongoing pandemic, when so many of us have lost someone we love.”

Prasad added: “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last.” Amazon has not indicated whether this feature will ever be made public, but stated that its systems can no learn to imitate someone’s voice using just a single minute of recorded audio. With Amazon’s devices constantly listening in on users and the convenience of recording a voice note, it could mean that the average consumer could easily clone the voice of a family member.

I’ve seen how boomers are incapable of dealing with death – it’s inexplicable, the way these people freak out. They are totally incapable of processing the idea that bad things happen at all, let alone that people they know die. They can’t even think about the fact that they are all going to die one day.

Millennials are going to be much worse than boomers. Millennials are really just boomers on steroids. Every single stereotype that applies to boomers is like, a million times worse in millennials.

Point being: boomers are about to start dying in droves, and those are the parents of millennials. Millennials are going to all be trying to bring back their dead parents using Alexa. People don’t form real human relationships with each other anymore anyway, so basically, if Alexa can make a voice and a face of their parents, that will be the same as if they never died.

But imagine that people form relationships with these AI zombies of their dead parents and then the AI zombies first start marketing Amazon products to them, and then eventually start telling them to eat bugs and become trannies.

“Your zombie mommy is possessed by the spirit of Klaus Schwab” will be a statement we all have to say at some point.