AI expert discusses concerns of voice cloning after arrest of Baltimore County athletics director
BALTIMORE - A former Baltimore County athletics director was arrested for allegedly using artificial intelligence to impersonate a school principal with racist and antisemitic comments about people at the school.
An artificial intelligence expert spoke with WJZ about AI-generated voice cloning and how concerned you should be about having your voice cloned without your permission.
Dazhon Darien, a former athletics director at Pikesville High School, reportedly used AI to generate a fake audio file which many people thought was the school's principal making racist and antisemitic comments behind closed doors.
"With the relative ease, that is available to the public to access tools that allow people to replicate your voice," said Gabriella Waters, an artificial intelligence and machine learning researcher. "It's definitely something you want to be aware of."
Waters, the director of Morgan State University's Cognitive and Neurodiversity AI Lab, says producing convincing AI-generated voice clones takes just minutes and is just a few clicks away.
"It's pretty simple," Waters said. "These tools are designed to make it easy. You don't need to have a programming background anymore in order to interact with these systems or this tech."
Darien is charged with disrupting school activities. Investigators accused him of using artificial intelligence to clone the school principal's voice and then Darien allegedly circulated the audio file on social media, leading the public to believe the principal made racist and antisemitic comments.
According to charging documents, a forensic analyst who is also a contractor with the FBI indicated the audio file contained traces of AI-generated content with human editing after the fact, which added background noise for realism.
So, is there a concern about how some of this is being used?
"So there definitely is a concern" Waters said. "AI has been shown to have some harmful effects and some really cool benefits, but we are not solving for how can we reduce the harm, we are allowing it to just kind of flourish and we are waiting to see what happens. It' not a wait and see kind of thing. It is imperative to act right now."
