AI has become more and more involved in our lives over 2024. From ChatGPT writing essays to stealing art, AI has crawled into the niches of the internet and simultaneously made our lives easier and infringed on them. A recent development in AI is voice generators, which allows someone to take recordings of someone’s voice and make them say something else through AI. This brings up a lot of moral issues that AI has already exposed, and maybe it’s time we put our foot down.
AI has been in use for longer than we think in some way, shape or form. Math calculators like Desmos use a form of AI to create graphs, run diagnostics and other programs during research to record data. These versions of AI are simple and can’t produce original work and data of their own, they only take what is given. There’s even AI models that allow you to summary complicated study materials into a format that works for you while keeping the essential materials. While more advanced AIs can create study programs and help us learn more from each other, this new technology can also be used for not-so-helpful functions.
The first effect that was recognized by the general public was AI’s ability to write essays that looked and sounded like they were written by a professional, but this mainly effected education by creating concerns about students AIing assignments. Then came photos and art, and we realized the scope of the issues with AI. Companies had to get pictures from somewhere to feed their algorithms, and this often meant stealing art from actual artists that posted their work online. Now, AI has started replacing actual artists in companies, as seen in the AI Coca Cola ad that ran this year, and people are calling for overdue regulations surrounding how companies harvest data.
Voice generators can be even worse, as they don’t replicate art or ghost-write an essay, they replicate people. Firstly, like writing and art, the way these companies farm voices are unregulated as well as what they do with those recordings. Again, this is so incredibly unethical and crosses personal boundaries by essentially stealing part of a person. I have heard cases where people have been called by a random number and hear a loved one in distress begging for something, normally money, to get out of a situation; these calls are AI generated. They sound so incredibly realistic that it makes me wonder what else these generators can be used for. An AI generated voice could be even created for illegal voiceovers in media. AI is already annoying and dangerous to our creativity, but voice generators could be a threat to us.
We can’t completely get rid of AI voice generators, but we can do our best to mitigate their effects. I recommend avoiding using your own voice for any generator at all. In addition, we should start boycotting companies that use AI voices in their media and commercials. AI should be a helping tool to help us study and learn, not a threat to our safety and personal rights.
