Have you ever heard your mum being kidnapped or trapped somewhere? Because the number of people have increased without the number of kidnappings increasing. The New Yorker (Bethea, 2024) has published an article in 2024 writing about different people falling victim to their loved one’s voice calling, in need of money.
Due to the recent developments of AI we are now able to use people’s voices without them having to actually say anything. There is definitely positive aspects of it regarding the capture of someone’s voice when they for example lose it in terms of medical conditions but the sad thing is that the negative consequences seem to take over.
Scam calls are not a thing that has been new in the last years. Robotic voices asking for money or people trying to trick you to subscribe something over the phone has been an issue over meany years but it was more simple to see through a scam. Now, scams have gotten much more personal and emotional through the use of loved one’s voices. The development of aid technologies like Siri and Alexa as well as now AI like ChatGPT is what has caused this problem. We as humans love technological advancement and anything that seems to help us in our daily lives and can make it more efficient we consider good but now this technology has grown into dangerous areas.
The couple Robin and Steve are one such couple affected by these scam calls. As described in “The New Yorker” Robin has been called by her mother in law, Mona, in the middle of the night, who was giving her the feeling she was in trouble, until a man took over the call saying he was going to kill her if the couple didn’t send the total amount of $750. Although the couple was weirded out by this small amount they still proceeded the payment until the man hung up and they managed to reach Mona who was not sure what they were talking about. They had been scammed.
Another example The New Yorker gives is that of a mother getting a phone call of her daughter who was supposedly on a ski trip, saying that she messed up, with a man in the background who threatens to kill her by pumping drugs in her stomach. The details of the phone call must have been terrifying and disgusting which is also why the mother who got this phone call started cussing at the phone caller for putting these kinds of images into her head, before hanging up, once she found out it was a scam.
The problem of this, however, stretches way further than blackmailing and scam calls. Politicians like Biden’s voice have been used to call voters, telling them to not vote him which is a shift in a political direction that could end up with democratic elections being less credible and authentic (Bethea, 2024).
This kind of human to nonhuman boundary has been lifted off way more than ever before causing the loss of understanding what is real and what is not. It affects us as humans emotionally, financially, and politically and these technologies start growing on their own now. Once a voice has been recorded, it can be used by AI. And we are still only at the beginning of this process and don’t yet know how much it will affect of our lives in the future.
Bethea, C. (2024, March 7). The Terrifying A.I. Scam That Uses Your Loved One’s Voice. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/the-terrifying-ai-scam-that-uses-your-loved-ones-voice