The reason that regulators are now interested in AI is that powerful AI models are now accessible by anyone with a credit card. I demonstrated this point last Friday by playing a clone of my voice I’d developed in only a few minutes at the Vistage Executive Summit in Manchester.
It was part of my “AI world tour”, and I had just shown an example by Stephen Fry at the recent CogX festival where a documentary had been “voiced” by Stephen without his knowledge after 7 Harry Potter audiobooks had been used to train a model.
As the Actionable Futurist, and naturally Digitally Curious, I wanted to see if I could do the same. I used the Eleven Labs tool to sample a few minutes of my voice from some recent talks, and within 5 minutes, I had a reasonable clone of my voice, which I can now use to say anything at all.
Imagine the positive and nefarious uses this technology could be applied to.
Eleven Labs also offer a more comprehensive Professional Voice Clone of your own voice, which requires a month to create, and I hope to be able to compare this to the “instant voice clone” I demonstrated at the events in upcoming talks.
With my upcoming book, I can see a way to use this to quickly develop the audiobook version, without having to read for many hours. On the negative side, this “malicious digital twin” could also be used against me, with a bad actor calling a friend or family member, emulating me in a distressed state and asking for money.
As in all my talks, I encourage my audience to try these new technologies themselves, and with Generative AI now only a few clicks away, you should be playing with this technology to see what it can do for you and your business.
Are you brave enough, however, to create a clone of your own voice?
On Friday in Manchester, my last slide contained a QR code with links to a single page with all the AI resources I had mentioned on stage, and I know it was useful as more than 200 people have already accessed it. These resources are available to you also via futurist.click
This week my AI World tour comes to the RSA Great Room in London, and then next week, I’m in Dubai. Stay tuned for where I end up next, explaining the power of AI to corporates and their clients.