People are poorly equipped to detect AI-powered voice clones

Abstract

Abstract As generative artificial intelligence (AI) continues its ballistic trajectory, everything from text to audio, image, and video generation continues to improve at mimicking human-generated content. Through a series of perceptual studies, we report on the realism of AI-generated voices in terms of identity matching and naturalness. We find human participants cannot consistently identify recordings of AI-generated voices. Specifically, participants perceived the identity of an AI-generated voice to be the same as its real counterpart approximately $$80\%$$ of the time, and correctly identified a voice as AI generated only about $$60\%$$ of the time.