The deepfakes are coming! In recent years, the growing trend of AI manipulated media has been racking up views and making everyone from Tom Cruise to Nancy Pelosi say things they’ve never said before. And the technology behind these AI-driven deepfake models are only getting more accurate over time, meaning that one day soon, you might need to do a double take and make sure that’s actually your ‘Bestie’ when divulging all the hot gossip on Facetime.
We’ve been altering media for decades (Hello Photoshop!), but when did deepfakes first hit the scene? In this episode of Same Same but Tech, we’ll tell the story of one scrappy startup called Lyrebird, which revolutionized an audio deepfake technology called voice cloning, which takes a small sample of a person’s voice and from there makes it be able to say… well… anything at all!
Co-Founder and Head of Research Kundan Kumar gives the inside look at how they developed their voice clones and released them to the world. To hype up their new platform, they put out an audio deepfake of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2017 casually discussing the new technology and it promptly broke the internet. From there they developed the product and signed up a bunch of users who started cloning their own voices. In 2019, Lyrebird joined up with like-minds at Descript to create even more AI-driven media manipulation tools along with Overdub, their key collaboration.
But are we heading towards a future of distrust and suspicion for everyone we see and everything we do online? Can you trust everything you see? Everything you hear? Has a voice clone already taken over hosting duties for this very podcast? We might just have to run a deepfake detection program on Mauhan to find out. We’ll also explore the ethical implications of the future of deepfake technology with expert insight from MIT Media Lab Professor, Pattie Maes and Research Assistant, Pat Pataranutaporn.
Hosted by Máuhan M Zonoozy, Head of Innovation at Spotify, Partner-alum at BCG Digital Ventures, and NYC-based angel investor and entrepreneur.
Visit our website: https://www.samesamepodcast.com