People are poorly equipped to detect AI-powered voice clones
Barrington, S., Cooper, E. A., & Farid, H. (2025). People are poorly equipped to detect AI-powered voice clones. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 11004. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-94170-3
Abstract
As generative artificial intelligence (AI) continues its ballistic trajectory, everything from text to audio, image, and video generation continues to improve at mimicking human-generated content. Through a series of perceptual studies, we report on the realism of AI-generated voices in terms of identity matching and naturalness. We find human participants cannot consistently identify recordings of AI-generated voices. Specifically, participants perceived the identity of an AI-generated voice to be the same as its real counterpart approximately of the time, and correctly identified a voice as AI generated only about 60% of the time.