Tom Cruise on TikTok, Trump having a baby with Kamala Harris, or even Barack Obama talking nonsense (Catherine Mackay, 2019)—celebrities are increasingly impacted by Deepfake technology.
Deepfake is a remarkable combination of AI voice generation, AI lip-syncing, AI image generation, and other advanced AI software. Together, they create a convincing replica, or “deep fake,” of anyone with enough digital content available online—which includes almost every celebrity or influencer.
In this blogpost, I will explain a new intriguing application that I discovered last year. Like many of you , I have seen these videos where we can see celebrities talking and saying obvious fake news. This intrigues me, and I did some research on the different technologies I could use for myself, and the voice generator was something very intriguing, to say the least.
Today, there are popular applications like ElevenLabs, which lets you create highly convincing voices or sound effects, and FakeYou, which mimics famous people or characters.
ElevenLabs has already been helpful for one of my academic projects. One challenge when recording a video is that without professional equipment, the audio quality can seem amateur. But with this AI software, you can generate a professional-sounding voice and easily integrate it into your workflow. The software allows for a range of adjustments, such as making the voice more enthusiastic or angry, or changing the speed of the narration (as you can hear in Audio Clip 1). The platform even provides background sound effects—like in the Audio Clip 2 where I requested a bustling cityscape with people chatting and cars passing by.
On the other hand, FakeYou is more about fun at the moment. The voices aren’t as clear and don’t offer as much customization as ElevenLabs, but it lets you choose a character or personality and have them say whatever you want. In Audio Clip 3, for example, I used the voice of SpongeBob.
In conclusion, I encourage you to explore these tools—whether it’s just for fun with FakeYou or for more professional uses with ElevenLabs. Both offer exciting possibilities, and you can create a professional voiceover without breaking the bank!
Reference
Catherine Mackay. (2019, September 16). DeepFake Obama JordanPeele Short [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on7wVajA9Qs
