Companies at the forefront of AI voice technology are grappling with how to regulate deepfakes without stifling innovation.
“It will be a game of cat and mouse,” said Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs. told The Atlantic.
ElevenLabs — which valued at $1.1 billion after launching in beta last year, uses AI to generate compelling audio clips. This includes text-to-speech, audio dubbing in 29 languages, and voice cloning. The company claims its users have generated over 100 years of audio over the past year.
However, lawmakers fear the technology has dangerous potential for abuse.
Advances in AI correlate with a rise in over-the-top phone scams in which impostor fraudsters pose as love interests, family members or government officials. Biden’s AI chief, Bruce Reed even talked about “voice cloning” is the only thing that keeps him up at night.
And last year, 4chan users exploited ElevenLabs’ tool to generate deepfakes of celebrities spewing racist and transphobic content, according to Vice.
But Staniszewski is an idealist.
He sees ElevenLabs’ technology as contributing to a world in which patients with neurodegenerative diseases like ALS can still communicate through their voices even after losing the ability to speak. It can also serve as a tool to help people communicate across cultures and languages.
Mayor of New York Eric Adams made robocalls in Mandarin, Yiddish and Haitian Creole using ElevenLabs technology and said he was able to reach more of the city’s non-English speaking residents.
To capitalize on this potential while preventing fraud, Staniszweski said users should be able to identify AI-generated voices and human voices. The “real solution,” Staniszewski told The Atlantic, is to digitally watermark synthetic voices so humans can differentiate real voices from fake ones.
The company is developing the technology, but it will only be effective with the cooperation of other companies. ElevenLabs has signed an agreement with several other AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, to combat deepfakes in the 2024 elections.
ElevenLabs did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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