It sounds too fanciful and too outrageous to be true, but nothing is too outrageous for the world the tech bros have bequeathed us. The BBC has revealed that various websites and YouTube channels are using AI to clone the voice of David Attenborough and get him to say things – about Russia, about the US election – that surely he would never say.
It’s not the first time it has happened to a celebrity – Scarlett Johansson refused to license her voice to ChatGPT and accused them of creating it anyway, in a character called Sky. ChatGPT’s developer, OpenAI, said Sky was “a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice”, but it pulled the voice “out of respect for Ms Johansson”. Elsewhere, lawyers continue to tussle, using precedents that pre-date the existence of AI by several decades, which is to say with one hand tied behind their back.
The hoax Attenborough is a different category of sinister, however. Johansson is a lot of things, all of them excellent, but she is not the global authority on important things that are true. Attenborough may not be the last true embodiment of trust in a compromised world, but I row back from that assertion only because I fear it is UK-centric. I stand by this: if you can’t hear his voice and believe it, then you can’t hear or believe anything.
Red flags went up around AI voice generation over the potential for scamming – the risk that soon it would be able to scrape your kid’s voice off their TikTok output, create a believable hostage tape and have you emptying your bank account into the ether before you realised said kid was in his bedroom the whole time.
It seemed plausible in the sense that people will do any number of stupid things if they hear a loved one in peril, but it was implausible – to me, at least – because, as credible as the voice might be, I think AI would fall down in the believability of the text. It does a terrible job of sounding human even when it tries simply to describe a sunset. The idea that it could mimic the tone of one of my children seems absurd; I would smell a rat at the words “Hi, Mum” (way too much preamble) and laugh out loud if one of them said “please”, even supposedly with a gun to their head.
And yet everything, everywhere, knows you better than you think. My Instagram “for you” feed is entirely buff guys trying to do home workouts while pit bulls impede them. I never even talk about any of those interests! Apparently, though, it wasn’t the work of Hercules to guess, just as it wouldn’t be that hard to guess that a teenager is sarcastic and has no manners.
Even revivified, that hoax-kidnap anxiety is still nothing compared with the faking of the naturalist. Technology untethered from values destroys those values, but with or without values it can also destroy itself.
Forensic DNA is a case study. Detection has become so good that, if you shake hands with someone, then pick up a coffee cup and drive 200 miles to a service station at which a robbery-murder takes place, the person you shook hands with could be placed at the scene. The accuracy, rather than making DNA more useful, has negated it completely; we are back in a world where only an alibi will do, AKA the 19th century. (I got that nugget from a true crime podcast, rather than a police force, so it may not yet be true everywhere. I don’t want anyone to panic and start a minute-by-minute diary of their whereabouts.)
But if AI voice generation becomes good enough to destroy trust in the most trusted, it quickly destroys trust in everything but a voice you can see coming out of a human, hurtling us back many centuries, to a world where we believed a limited number of family members, a few vetted associates and – on a really good day, if we had met him before – a messenger. In fake Attenborough, the scam of all scams, we have been casually mugged of modern communication.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
