AI voice cloning software has flimsy guardrails, report finds

Most leading artificial intelligence voice cloning programs have no meaningful barriers to stop people from nonconsensually impersonating others, a Consumer Reports investigation found.

Voice cloning AI technology has made remarkable strides in recent years, and many services can effectively mimic a person’s cadence with only a few seconds of sample audio. A flashpoint moment came during the Democratic primaries last year, when robocalls of a fake Joe Biden spammed the phones of voters telling them not to vote. The political consultant who admitted to masterminding the scheme was fined $6 million, and the Federal Communications Commission has since banned AI-generated robocalls.

A new survey of the six leading publicly available AI voice cloning tools found that five have easily bypassable safeguards, making it simple to clone a person’s voice without their consent. Deepfake audio detection software often struggles to tell the difference between real and synthetic voices.

Generative AI, which mimics human qualities such as their appearance, writing and voices, is a new and rapidly evolving technology, and the industry has few federal regulations. Most ethical and safety checks in the industry at large are self-imposed. Biden had included some safety demands in his executive order on AI, which he signed in 2023, though President Donald Trump revoked that order when he took office.

Voice cloning technology works by taking an audio sample of a person speaking and then extrapolating that person’s voice into a synthetic audio file. Without safeguards in place, anyone who registers an account can simply upload audio of an individual speaking, such as from a TikTok or YouTube video, and have the service imitate them.

Four of the services — ElevenLabs, Speechify, PlayHT and Lovo — simply require checking a box saying that the person whose voice is being cloned had given authorization.

Another service, Resemble AI, requires recording audio in real time, rather than allowing a person to just upload a recording. But Consumer Reports was able to easily circumvent that restriction by simply playing an audio recording from a computer.

Only the sixth service, Descript, had a somewhat effective safeguard. It requires a would-be cloner to record a specific consent statement, which is difficult to falsify except through cloning through another service.

All six services are available to the public via their websites. Only Eleven Labs and Resemble AI cost money — respectively $5 and $1 — to create a custom voice clone. The others are free.

Some of the companies claim that abuse of their tool can have serious negative consequences.

“We recognize the potential for misuse of this powerful tool and have implemented robust safeguards to prevent the creation of deepfakes and protect against voice impersonation,” a spokesperson for Resemble AI told NBC News in an emailed statement.

There are legitimate uses for AI voice cloning, including helping people with disabilities and creating audio translations of people speaking in different languages. But there is also enormous potential for harm, said Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, a think tank that focuses on the consequences of AI policy.

“This could obviously be used for fraud, scams and disinformation, for example impersonating institutional figures,” West told NBC News.

There is little research on the scope of how often AI is used in audio-based scams. In so-called grandparent scams, a criminal makes a phone call to a person claiming an emergency involving a family member, like they have been kidnapped, arrested or injured. The Federal Trade Commission has warned that such scams may use AI, though the scams predate the technology.

Cloned voices have been used to create music without the depicted artist’s permission, as happened with a viral 2023 song that falsely seemed to be by Drake and the Weeknd, and some musicians have struggled to control their image when other people release music with their voices.