Just one week after ElevenLabs opened their voice-cloning platform, people have been using it to deepfake voices of Emma Watson, Joe Rogan, Tom Cruise, and others to say racist and all other sorts of “ist and ism” things.
Who Are ElevenLabs?
ElevenLabs created software allows users to upload clips of someone speaking, which are used to generate an artificial voice. This can then be applied to the firm’s text-to-speech speech synthesis feature, which by default offers a list of characters with various accents that can read up to 2,500 characters at once.
The clips uploaded to 4chan are focused on celebrities. But given the high quality of the generated voices, and the apparent ease at which people created them, they highlight the looming risk of deepfake audio clips.
In one example, which I have dutifully searched for and provided below, you can hear far-left Emma Watson reading a section of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
I could listen to hours of this pic.twitter.com/6f13RW4Evy
— ◤Spectralist◥ (@demispectral) January 31, 2023
They Made Ron Swanson Gay!
In another example, there is President Trump going off on one about how The Last Of Us has made Ron Swanson gay. If you search hard enough you get Ben Sharpio making racist remarks about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Tucker Carlson calling for a race war and Joe Biden being a “transphobe”.
— I,Hypocrite (@lporiginalg) February 1, 2023
And in the ultimate smack of irony, you get Rick Sanchez from Rick & Morty saying:
“I’m going to beat my wife Morty. I’m going to beat my fucking wife Morty. I’m going to beat her to death Morty.”
Bearing in mind that Justin Roiland, who voices Sanchez, recently appeared in court for a pre-trial hearing on charges of felony domestic violence and has been axed from his own show. Naturally, this has not gone down well and ElevenLabs were quick to respond.
A Crazy Weekend
On Monday, shortly after the clips circulated on 4chan, ElevenLabs wrote on Twitter:
“Crazy weekend—thank you to everyone for trying out our Beta platform. While we see our tech being overwhelmingly applied to positive use, we also see an increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases.”
ElevenLabs added that while it can trace back any generated audio to a specific user, it was exploring more safeguards. These include requiring payment information or full ID identification in order to perform voice cloning or manually verifying every voice cloning request.
What a time to be alive!
Check back every day for new content at Last Movie Outpost.
To like us on Facebook Click Here
To follow us on Twitter Click Here
See our YouTube channel Click Here
