Rachel Mealey: Cloning a person's voice using artificial intelligence is now cheaper and easier than ever before. With no visual clues, fake audio can be difficult to detect and poses a unique threat to democracy. The technology has become convincing enough to fool even some of the most ardent political supporters. Matt Martino from ABC News Verify has more.
Matt Martino: What you're about to hear is AI-generated audio. But imagine picking up the phone to this robocall.
Jacqui Lambie AI: G'day Tasmanians, it's Senator Jackie Lambie here. As the federal election gets closer, let's get serious.
Matt Martino: It's Jackie Lambie, right? Wrong. It's a clone of her voice, artificially generated by ABC News Verify with the Senator's permission. Another AI-generated announcement follows.
Jacqui Lambie AI: And if re-elected, I'll fight tooth and nail to move the national capital from Canberra to Tassie, where it bloody well belongs.
Matt Martino: Here's the issue. When a video is produced by AI, there can be warning signs, for example, an out-of-sync mouth. There's none of that with audio, relying on the listener's scepticism to flag something's wrong. We went looking for that in Burney, Tasmania, deep in Jackie Lambie territory, playing the clone voice to voters.
Jacqui Lambie AI: Where it bloody well belongs. What do you think of that?
Vox pop 1: Good on her. I like her. She's good value.
Vox pop 2: I like Jackie Lambie. You know, she's very forthright. What if I told you that that was AI-generated?
Vox pop 1: Really? Oh. I think to start with, I was a little bit like, this isn't quite right.
Matt Martino: ABC News Verify used a well-known platform to create the voice. No technical assistance was required, just a small fee and a 90-second clip of the Senator taking from an old interview about a different subject entirely, alarming the politician we cloned. It's scary.
Jacqui Lambie: It is really scary that they're this close to sounding like Jackie Lambie. It's only going to be a matter of months. I'd say months before they have it exact.
Toby Murray: There's always an arms race between the good guys and the bad guys, so to speak.
Matt Martino: That's Toby Murray, Professor of Computer Information Systems at the University of Melbourne.
Toby Murray: Or between those who are trying to detect and those who are trying to circumvent that detection.
Matt Martino: Some tools exist to detect AI audio, but they're imperfect and can be easy to get around.
Toby Murray: We should absolutely expect that detection technology will get better, but we should also expect that it's never going to be perfect.
Matt Martino: The Australian Electoral Commission told us robocalls, whether artificially generated or not, are required to contain an authorisation. The public can report those they don't believe to be true. But Professor Murray says awareness is key in the battle against fakes.
Toby Murray: Just in the same way that when you see an ad on Facebook or a post on Facebook that's making very outrageous claims, your degree of outrage should be some warning to you that maybe what you're seeing is perhaps not 100% true. And the same is true when you're hearing someone's voice. If the claims being made are outrageous, that's probably a pretty good tip off that perhaps what you're hearing is not legitimate.
Rachel Mealey: Professor Toby Murray from the University of Melbourne, ending that report from Matt Martino.