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Dear readers.  

Its confession time. Last month my article was about ChatGPT and its ability to write essay, answer complex questions and more. The confession, I did not write 95% of the article! As a demonstration, ChatGPT wrote it. I then amended some lines. This was simply a show of its ability as an AI (artificial intelligence) to be able to con civilisation!  

This month, to further discuss this item (this time in my own words and with only the power of a coffee), I am going to explain how scammers are using AI to generate conversations using our own voices against us.  

In the USA last year, thousands of people were scammed out of millions of dollars by using simulated voices of family, friends, and even doctors and lawyers. The process of cloning a voice is known as “deep voice”. 

A short voice call is enough to start the process off. It could be a video of your friend with audio of them talking, or a phone call from a scammer to get the voice pattern before using it against you. Although it sounds like something out of Terminator, it is reality. So much so that in 2020 a bank manager in Hong Kong transferred $35 MILLION to an unknown account. When questioned about it, the branch manager claimed he had received a call from the familiar voice of the director of the bank. This cloned voice, along with targeted emails showing conversations with the lawyer (also a fake) and instructed him to make a transfer for an acquisition. It turns out the voice of the director was a clone; the email conversation was a fake but all good enough to convince the man to make the transfer. They lost the $35 million. 

This is one of dozens of reported incidents around the globe. Although not common at the moment, the time will come where every conversation can be cloned. Hopefully technology will keep up with these scams, and allow us to know, or even stop these calls before they happen.  

Just to make you a little more nervous, have a look on YouTube for a video called “Google Assistant Haircut Appointment Call“. Scary! More so that it happened 4 years ago!  

Welcome to the future!