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Ethics & Safety United Kingdom Cautious perspective

My mother almost wired money to a cloned voice

Cautious Posted by Edith Braithwaite Reading time ~ 2 min

This is community opinion, not fact. Moderated before publication.

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My mother is seventy-nine and lives on her own in a small town in Yorkshire. Two months ago she received a phone call that sounded exactly like my brother, in distress, asking her to send money for an emergency. She was on the way to the bank when she thought to call me, and I was with my brother at the time. The voice was not him. When we reported it, the officer we spoke to said this kind of call is now routine, and that the recordings needed to produce a convincing voice are often scraped from short social media clips. I am not opposed to AI. I use it at work and I see the benefits. What I want to say publicly is that the rollout of these capabilities has run ahead of the public's ability to defend against them. My mother reads the newspaper every day. She is not naive. She had simply never been told that a voice on the phone could be fabricated from a minute of audio. Banks, phone networks, and consumer protection agencies need to assume that this is the baseline threat now and communicate it plainly to older customers. I would like to see clear, large-print guidance from government channels, not buried in a website nobody visits. If we want people to trust AI in the good cases, we have to protect them in the bad ones.
#Government Resources #Consumer Resources #Ethics & Safety

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