Digital cloning is an emerging technology, that involves deep-learning algorithms, which allows one to manipulate currently existing audio, photos, and videos that are hyper-realistic.[1] One of the impacts of such technology is that hyper-realistic videos and photos makes it difficult for the human eye to distinguish what is real and what is fake.[2] Furthermore, with various companies making such technologies available to the public, they can bring various benefits as well as potential legal and ethical concerns.
Digital cloning can be categorized into audio-visual (AV), memory, personality, and consumer behaviour cloning.[3] In AV cloning, the creation of a cloned digital version of the digital or non-digital original can be used, for example, to create a fake image, an avatar, or a fake video or audio of a person that cannot be easily differentiated from the real person it is purported to represent. A memory and personality clone like a mindclone is essentially a digital copy of a person’s mind. A consumer behavior clone is a profile or cluster of customers based on demographics.
Truby and Brown coined the term “digital thought clone” to refer to the evolution of digital cloning into a more advanced personalized digital clone that consists of “a replica of all known data and behavior on a specific living person, recording in real-time their choices, preferences, behavioral trends, and decision making processes.”[3]
Voice cloning is a deep-learning algorithm that takes in voice recordings of an individual and is able to synthesize such a voice into one that is very similar to the original voice. Similar to deepfakes, there are numerous apps, such as Resemble AI, iSpeech, and CereVoice Me, that gives the public access to such technology. The algorithm simply needs at most a couple of minutes of audio recordings in order to produce a voice that is similar and it will also take in any text and will read it out loud. Although this application is still in the developmental stage, it is rapidly developing as big technology corporations, such as Google and Amazon are investing huge amounts of money for the development.[15]
Some of the positive uses of voice cloning include the ability to synthesize millions of audiobooks without the use of human labor. Another include those who may have lost their voice can gain back a sense of individuality by creating their own voice clone by inputting recordings of them speaking before they lost their voices. On the other hand, voice cloning is also susceptible to misuse. An example of this is voices of celebrities and public officials being cloned and the voice may say something to provoke conflict despite the actual person has no association to what their voice said.[16]
In recognition of the threat that voice cloning poses to privacy, civility, and democratic processes, the Institutions including the Federal Trade Commission, U.S. Department of Justice and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have weighed in on various deepfake audio use cases and methods that might be used to combat them.[17]
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