FTC offering cash prizes for ideas to crack down on voice cloning
The fact that the FTC launched the unusual competition reflects concerns that AI advances will make voice-cloning efforts faster to pull off and harder to detect.
If your company’s legal department has ideas to keep voice-cloning scammers at bay, the Federal Trade Commission wants to hear from you—and might even send you a cash prize.
The agency began accepting submissions for its “Voice Cloning Challenge” and will accept submissions at this website through the end of the week. The top submission will receive $25,000.
The agency announced the competition last fall in order to develop multidisciplinary approaches—from products to policies to procedures—aimed at protecting consumers from artificial intelligence-enabled voice-cloning harms.
The fact that the FTC launched the unusual competition reflects the sky-high concern at the agency that AI advances will make once-cumbersome voice-cloning efforts faster to pull off and harder to detect.
“We will use every tool to prevent harm to the public stemming from abuses of voice-cloning technology,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said when the competition was unveiled. “We want to address harms before they hit the marketplace and enforce the law when they do.”
According to the Ankura Consulting Group, a process that once took massive amounts of data samples to achieve “now only requires as little as an aggregate of five minutes of a specific person’s voice-recorded data to produce a replicated output with user-provided text.”
Law.com reported on growing concerns about voice-cloning fraud last August. In the report, James Clough, Robin AI’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said bad actors can create videos that seem highly believable, complete with voice inflections that convey emotion.
“There’s going to just be this period of time where people might have to learn the hard way, that just because you see this video, that doesn’t mean it’s real,” he said. “Unfortunately, that time is basically about now.”
Schemes already are coming to light. For example, cloning of a CEO’s voice in the United Kingdom facilitated the fraudulent transfer of 220,000 euros ($234,000), and the impersonation of a branch manager in Hong Kong resulted in a $35 million heist.
The FTC says its existing enforcement tools give it the power to stop voice-cloning frauds. However, the agency nonetheless recently proposed an impersonation rule that would broaden its authority.
In addition to providing $25,000 to the winner of its challenge, the FTC will provide a $4,000 runner-up award and up to three $2,000 honorable mention awards.