Update: A Little Harder to Create Voice Deepfakes?

(Imposter scam wildebeest image from Imagen 3)

(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)

Remember my post early this morning entitled “Nearly $3 Billion Lost to Imposter Scams in the U.S. in 2024“?

The post touched on many items, one of which was the relative ease in using popular voice cloning programs to create fraudulent voices. Consumer Reports determined that four popular voice cloning programs “did not have the technical mechanisms necessary to prevent cloning someone’s voice without their knowledge or to limit the AI cloning to only the user’s voice.”

Reducing voice clone fraud?

Joel R. McConvey of Biometric Update wrote a piece (“Hi mom, it’s me,” an example of a popular fraudulent voice clone) that included an update on one of the four vendors cited by Consumer Reports.

In its responses, ElevenLabs – which was implicated in the deepfake Joe Biden robocall scam of November 2023 – says it is “implementing Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standards by embedding cryptographically-signed metadata into the audio generated on our platform,” and lists customer screening, voice CAPTCHA and its No-Go Voice technology, which blocks the voices of hundreds of public figures, as among safeguards it already deploys.

Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity

So what are these C2PA standards? As a curious sort (I am ex-IDEMIA, after all), I investigated.

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) addresses the prevalence of misleading information online through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history (or provenance) of media content. C2PA is a Joint Development Foundation project, formed through an alliance between Adobe, Arm, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic.

There are many other organizations whose logos appear on the website, including Amazon, Google, Meta, and Open AI.

Provenance

I won’t plunge into the entire specifications, but this excerpt from the “Explainer” highlights an important word, “provenance” (the P in C2PA).

Provenance generally refers to the facts about the history of a piece of digital content assets (image, video, audio recording, document). C2PA enables the authors of provenance data to securely bind statements of provenance data to instances of content using their unique credentials. These provenance statements are called assertions by the C2PA. They may include assertions about who created the content and how, when, and where it was created. They may also include assertions about when and how it was edited throughout its life. The content author, and publisher (if authoring provenance data) always has control over whether to include provenance data as well as what assertions are included, such as whether to include identifying information (in order to allow for anonymous or pseudonymous assets). Included assertions can be removed in later edits without invalidating or removing all of the included provenance data in a process called redaction.

Providence

I would really have to get into the nitty gritty of the specifications to see exactly how ElevenLabs, or anyone else, can accurately assert that a voice recording alleged to have been made by Richard Nixon actually was made by Richard Nixon. Hint: this one wasn’t.

Incidentally, while this was obviously never spoken, and I don’t believe that Nixon ever saw it, the speech was drafted as a contingency by William Safire. And I think everyone can admit that Safire could soar as a speechwriter for Nixon, whose sense of history caused him to cast himself as an American Churchill (with 1961 to 1969 as Nixon’s “wilderness years”). Safire also wrote for Agnew, who was not known as a great strategic thinker.

And the Apollo 11 speech above is not the only contingency speech ever written. Someone should create a deepfake of this speech that was NEVER delivered by then-General Dwight D. Eisenhower after D-Day:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.