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Top 3 most popular artificial intelligence scams and how to avoid them

AI Scams: Cloned voices, deep fakes and personalized emails
AI Scams: Cloned voices, deep fakes and personalized emails 04:23

NEW YORK -- There's a lot about artificial intelligence that makes life easier, like "Alexa" and autocorrect, but AI is also a tool for scammers. 

Sree Sreenivasan, tech expert and co-founder of the digital media agency Digimentors, told CBS New York's Cindy Hsu about three of the most popular AI scams: 

  • Cloned voices of loved ones
  • "Deepfake" photos or videos
  • Real-looking, personalized emails

Hsu sent Sreenivasan a one-minute snippet of her reading a book, and he cloned her voice into a complete fake.

"It takes your audio and then allows me to put it on any text, so that you are saying anything I want you to say. In this case, it was you reading or talking about the Gettysburg Address," he explained. 

So how can you protect yourself from getting scammed?

  • Create a safe word (a word that everyone in the family knows and asks for in any emergency)
  • Hang up and call them back
  • Be skeptical -- anything that's too good to be true or too bad to be true usually is  

See more of Sreenivasan's insight on artificial intelligence here. 

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