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Voice cloning is an emerging technology powered by artificial intelligence and it's raising alarms about its potential misuse. Earlier this year, New Hampshire voters experienced this firsthand when a deepfake mimicking President Joe Biden’s voice urged them to skip the polls ahead of the primary. The deepfake likely needed only several seconds of the president's voice to create the clone. According to multiple AI voice cloning models, about 10 seconds of an actual voice is all that is needed to recreate it. And that can easily come from a phone call or a video from social media. "A person's voice is really probably not that information-dense. It's not as unique as you may think," James Betker, a technical staff member at OpenAI, told Scripps News. Betker developed TortoiseTTS, an open-source voice cloning model. "It's actually very easy to model, very easy to learn, the distribution of all human voices from a fairly small amount of data," Betker added. How AI voice cloning works AI models have been trained on vast amounts of data, learning to recognize human speech. Programs analyze the data and train repeatedly, learning characteristics such as rhythm, stress, pitch and tone. "It can look at 10 seconds of someone speaking and it has stored enough information about how humans speak with that kind of prosody and pitch. Enough information about how people speak with their processing pitch and its weights that it can just continue on," Betker said. Imagine a trained AI model as a teacher, and the person cloning the voice to be a student. When a student asks to create a cloned voice, it starts off as white noise. The teacher scores how close the student is to sounding correct. The student tries again and again based on these scores until the student produces something close to what the teacher wants. While this explanation is extremely simplified, the concept of generating a cloned voice is based on bit-by-bit, based on probability distributions. "I think, at its core, it's pretty simple," Betker said. "I think the analogy of just continuing with what you're given will take you pretty far here." There are currently some AI models that claim to only need two seconds of samples. While the results are not convincing yet, Betker says future models will need even fewer voice samples to create a convincing clone.Erwin backtracks on Sierra 55, apologizes to and thanks group
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WASHINGTON — Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christoper Wray declined to testify publicly at a Senate committee hearing Thursday on threats to the nation, drawing a rare bipartisan rebuke from members who had to cancel it at the last minute. It was the second scuttled congressional hearing in as many days for Mayorkas and Wray, whose agencies said they offered to answer questions in detail in a classified briefing. The House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday postponed their threats hearing — after it had been scheduled to start — and instead planned a classified version next month. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Gary Peters, D-Mich., pulled no punches in condemning the high-ranking officials — even though one is a Cabinet appointee in a Democratic administration — for a “shocking departure” from the tradition of public testimony at the annual hearing. “Their choice to not provide public testimony about their departments’ efforts to address wide-ranging national security threats robs the American people of critical information and the opportunity for public accountability of what the federal government is doing to keep Americans safe,” Peters said. “Americans deserve transparent, public answers about the threats we face.” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the top Republican on the panel, called it “unacceptable” that they didn’t testify publicly. “The American people deserve to hold these officials accountable for their actions under the Biden administration,” Paul said. It was the first time in more than 15 years that the secretary of Homeland Security and the FBI director have refused to appear before the Homeland Security committee for the threats hearing, Peters said. The likely issues members wanted to hear about include Russia continuing its efforts with election interference, which now includes evidence of bomb threats to polling places in Georgia during the 2024 election, as well as reports of certain Federal Emergency Management Agency officials who were on the ground during relief efforts for Hurricane Helene and refused to go to the homes of those with Trump campaign signs. Also, questions swirl over whether President-elect Donald Trump will upon taking office seek to fire the FBI director, who will be in the middle of his five-year term at the start of new administration, and the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts on immigration and security at the U.S-Mexico border. “Secretary Mayorkas and Director Wray’s refusal to speak publicly about their department’s work will only increase the concerns that many Americans have about our nation’s security at a challenging time, flout the committee’s efforts to conduct responsible oversight, and will deal a serious blow to trust in our government,” Peters said. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email that “DHS and the FBI have offered to the Committee a classified briefing to discuss the threats to the Homeland in detail, providing the Committee with the information it needs to conduct its work in the months ahead.” “DHS and the FBI already have shared with the Committee and other Committees, and with the American public, extensive unclassified information about the current threat environment, including the recently published Homeland Threat Assessment,” the spokesperson said. “DHS takes seriously its obligation to respond to Congressional requests for testimony; in fact, Secretary Mayorkas has testified 30 times during his tenure.” The FBI in an email statement said the agency remains “committed to sharing information. FBI leaders have testified extensively in public settings about the current threat environment and believe the Committee would benefit most from further substantive discussions and additional information that can only be provided in a classified setting,” the FBI statement said. But those explanations weren’t enough to stop criticism from members of the Senate panel on both sides of the aisle. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., posted on social media late Wednesday that he heard Wray and Mayorkas were trying to cancel the hearing “and testify only behind closed doors.” After the duo canceled, Hawley posted that he looked forward “to Director Wray’s resignation.” “This is Mayorkas & Wray giving the middle finger to the American people,” Hawley wrote. “They are REQUIRED BY LAW to testify. And now they’re saying it’s good enough to post something on a website? Both are unfit for office. The Senate should subpoena them immediately and hold them in contempt.” The cancellation in the House resulted in much more muted response from lawmakers. Neither Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, chair of the Homeland Security Committee, nor Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the committee’s top Democrat, issued public statements. On Thursday, a House majority committee spokesperson said negotiations had been ongoing with Wray and Mayorkas. “Since early last week, our Committee had been working with the departments on setting up a classified Worldwide Threats hearing — something both the Committee majority members and DHS/FBI expressed they wanted,” the spokesperson said. “Logistically, that proved unfeasible in the timeframe we were working with, so we were planning to hold a public hearing. However, a few days ago, after further negotiation, we came to an agreement to postpone until December and to hold the hearing in a classified setting then.” ©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Surveillance tech advances by Biden could aid in Trump's promised crackdown on immigration
By Harshita Mary Varghese (Reuters) – Alphabet led a Big Tech rally on Wednesday, with its stock hitting a record high after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump picked Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to lead the consumer protection and antitrust agency. Trump tapped Ferguson on Tuesday to replace Lina Khan, whose term as FTC chair has expired. The agency became a political flashpoint under Khan, who promoted antitrust enforcement as a check on corporate power. Several Big Tech firms such as Google-parent Alphabet, Microsoft and Apple faced heightened regulatory pressure from the FTC during her tenure. Ferguson was a “known dissenter” under Khan “and many people feel under his leadership the antitrust case against Alphabet will come to an end”, said Jay Woods, chief global strategist at Freedom Capital Markets. Trump and his team have been broadly critical of Big Tech companies, although some of his most prominent backers were tech executives, and it is unclear how they will approach regulatory and M&A policy for that sector. Alphabet’s shares rose about 5.5% to hit a record high of $195.45. Tesla jumped 4.6%, also to a record high, extending its rally since the Nov. 5 presidential election on bets the EV-maker will benefit from CEO Elon Musk’s close relationship with Trump. Other tech shares also rallied. Microsoft gained 1.2% and Amazon.com and Meta Platforms added 2% each. The latest inflation report raised expectations of an interest-rate cut by the U.S. Federal Reserve later this month, lifting technology stocks. Shares of Alphabet have gained over 10% in the last two days following announcements from the company about its AI agents and quantum-chip breakthrough. Google released the second generation of its Gemini artificial-intelligence model earlier on Wednesday and teased a lineup of new ways to use AI beyond chatbots, including through a pair of eyeglasses. It unveiled a new-generation chip on Monday, which it said helped overcome a key challenge in quantum computing. “What we’re seeing here is Google positioning itself at the bleeding edge of a transformative technology,” said Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point Capital. “While Google sometimes has been viewed as ‘behind’ in AI, the recent quantum breakthrough shows us that the company knows how to construct processors,” said Jamie Meyers, senior analyst at Laffer Tengler Investments. (Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai) Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Reuters news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content. var ytflag = 0;var myListener = function() {document.removeEventListener('mousemove', myListener, false);lazyloadmyframes();};document.addEventListener('mousemove', myListener, false);window.addEventListener('scroll', function() {if (ytflag == 0) {lazyloadmyframes();ytflag = 1;}});function lazyloadmyframes() {var ytv = document.getElementsByClassName("klazyiframe");for (var i = 0; i < ytv.length; i++) {ytv[i].src = ytv[i].getAttribute('data-src');}} Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() );'Embarrassed would be an understatement', SocDems deputy leader says