- hannahderevo
Deepfake Dance: Artificial Intelligence Threatens Voiceover Talent on a Personal Level
I'm no Morgan Freeman with a voice that everyone everywhere could recognize. Actually, in the rare times I show my family my voiceover work, they don't even recognize it's my voice! But in this post, I'm not talking about impressions or spoofs where someone is imitating a famous person.
I'm also not talking about pranking a friend and pretending to be someone from India.
Deepfakes have recently become popular on social media and I *hope* rather than believe that everyone else is as freaked out by them as I am. There is sweet little Drew Berrymore in the face, saying my friend's favorite phrase. Her mouth is moving but I know it's not something she would say. It's weird.
But a vocal deepfake is something that will make your head spin. And it's not even funny.
A vocal deepfake is when someone with AI technology can take your voice and call up a family member and make it sound like you are desperately trying to get them to send you money for who knows what--buy a purse you just have to have, pay your bail and get you out of prison, beg you to pay a ransom....
They only need ten to 20 seconds of spoken audio is needed to be able to replicate your voice to say whatever they want you to say! And for a voiceover actor, our voice is freely available in many places! Now, it still won't sound like professional quality audio from a sound-proof booth, but it will fool a family member on a phone call.
"A security firm we spoke with said people usually only guess if an audio deepfake is real or fake with about 57 percent accuracy—no better than a coin flip" (HowtoGeek.com).
If you are new to the voiceover business, take care and protect yourself and your family from a vocal deepfake. It's recommended to come up with trigger word--a question you can ask the person that demands a predetermined answer. And if they are unable to answer correctly, you will know the call is a deepfake.
Interested in using the REAL Hannah Dere for voiceover work? Find out the difference in using a professional human voice for your next project--with all the quality audio editing, professional script reading and direction interpretation, and top-shelf customer service you can possibly imagine. Let's talk, you and I, today.