‘Hi, it’s Taylor Swift’: How AI is using gamous voices and why it matters

The Wall Street Journal quoted Siwei Lyu, SUNY Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, in a report about new chatbots mimicking famous celebrity and politician voices, possibly violating publicity rights and posing a risk of defamation. 

In recent months, synthetic audio, or speech that is computer-generated, has reached new levels of sophistication. 

Lyu, who is director of UB’s Media Forensic Lab and since 2019 has been working on detecting synthetic audio, said, “the quality just improved significantly, especially for people who have plenty of [audio] samples online.” 

Lyu also emphasizes this is not just a celebrity problem. “Our digital presence, our images, voices, videos of ourselves — everyone is becoming an asset we share with commercial companies and they’re making a profit.”

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