Priya Patel
Two separate teams of audio experts have suggested that the deepfake robocall impersonating President Biden that was received by some voters in New Hampshire last week was likely created using technology from voice-cloning startup ElevenLabs. The company recently achieved “unicorn” status after raising $80m at a $1.1bn valuation and markets its AI tools for uses such as audiobooks and video games. While ElevenLabs did not respond to requests for comment, Pindrop, a security firm specialising in synthetic audio, said its analysis of the clip pointed to the start-up’s technology. A separate analysis by the University of California, Berkeley, reached the same conclusion.
Market-leading AI voice-start-up ElevenLabs offers its own AI speech detector on its website. Both Pindrop and Berkeley achieved the same positive result when using the company’s test on the audio samples analysed.In addition to the presidential impersonation, disinformation watchdog NewsGuard claimed that last year TikTok accounts were used to share theories with AI -generated voices including a clone of Barack Obama’s voice and that these accounts used ElevenLabs’ technology. The company, whose investor base includes Sequoia Capital and SV Angel, said at the time that it was aware of instances of misuse and is working on safeguards to curb them.
