The voice actor of the iconic Darth Vader from the Star Wars franchise, James Earl Jones, has retired from voice acting. While Darth Vader was portrayed by several different actors over the years, his voice was always played by Jones. Interestingly, in future movies and series, the voice of the villain will be artificially produced in order to sound exactly like James Earl Jones in the 70s. Disney+’s series“Obi-Wan Kenobi” is the first production to use the Dart Vader AI voice ((“»Obi-Wan Kenobi«: Darth Vader Wird Schon von Einer Künstlichen Intelligenz Gesprochen,” 2022)
Ukrainian company, “Respeecher’, a voice cloning company from Kiew uses deep learning to model and replicate human voices in a way that is practically indistinguishable from the original. Using recordings from the past, Respeecher created a model that can be acted out vocally by any other actor, which is done with the use speech-to-speech (STS) technology (Breznican, 2022).
While, text-t-speech (TTS) is a sort of assistive technology that reads digital text aloud, STS turns speech into a different kind of speech. This has many advantages to TTS, as TTS provides non-natural, robotic emotions and is based on dictionaries, meaning that unknown words and abbreviations pose a significant challenge (Respeecher F.A.Q. | Voice Cloning, n.d.).
However, being able to recreate anyone’s voice can turn very creepy, when you can recreate your deceased grandmothers voice or it can even turn into a security problem. While Respeecher promises to only use their technology ethically, not for deceptive and never without permission, the voice cloning technology will also make its waves through the open source world and anyone will be able to recreate anyone’s voice (Edwards, 2022).
Security experts have voiced serious concerns about cyber security with the rise of voice cloning as criminals are able to, for example, send voice messages to people posing as their friends and asking for money. This happened in 2019, when scammers tricked the chief executive of a British energy company into transferring €200,000 to a supplier by imitating his bosses voice. The moral of the story is to always second guess your boss and that, as so often, laws and ethics are moving slower than new technologies.
»Obi-Wan Kenobi«: Darth Vader wird schon von einer künstlichen Intelligenz gesprochen. (2022, September 26). Der Spiegel. https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/obi-wan-kenobi-darth-vader-wird-schon-von-einer-kuenstlichen-intelligenz-gesprochen-a-6c94406c-e486-4474-a88c-dac64deb5b28
Breznican, A. (2022, September 23). Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated From War-Torn Ukraine. Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/09/darth-vaders-voice-emanated-from-war-torn-ukraine
de Persigny, G. (2021, October 5). Voice cloning: why is this technology dangerous and how people have already suffered – europeantimes.news. Www.europeantimes.news. https://www.europeantimes.news/2021/10/voice-cloning-why-is-this-technology-dangerous-and-how-people-have-already-suffered/
Edwards, B. (2022, September 26). Darth Vader’s voice will be AI-generated from now on. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/james-earl-jones-signed-darth-vader-voice-rights-to-disney-for-ai-use/
Respeecher F.A.Q. | Voice Cloning. (n.d.). Www.respeecher.com. Retrieved October 11, 2022, from https://www.respeecher.com/faq
Very interesting article Victoria! Although it is sad to see James Earl Jones retire, I can understand the appeal of using voice replication AI to keep the franchise and his legacy alive. However, I do agree with you that this type of artifical intellingence poses serious privacy and ethical concerns – afterall, who could ignore a call from a “loved one” asking for help? This makes me wonder, and want to ask you: What strategies do you think companies or individuals could use in order to protect themselves from voice cloning scams?