
Anti-AI AI: A device that notifies the wearer when a synthetic voice is detected - ColinWright
https://rnd.dt.com.au/anti-ai-ai-a-wearable-ai-device-244900e4d71c
======
usrusr
Science that looks suspiciously like an art performance that looks
suspiciously like being commissioned to prime us for the theatrical release of
Blade Runner 2049.

Science fiction did not prepare us for this future we are living in.

~~~
ccozan
Actually, "Back to the Future" did a really good job. However, not sure how
many of us took it seriously.

Since then, many of the things predicted have come, more or less, true. I
wonder, which SF movie we should pay attention to.

Ex Machina or Blade Runner, or even Agents of SHIELD, show us what a rogue AI
might do, means people do take this "menace" seriously or is just a ... film
feature/ good plot?

It seems that someone is building a business based on this "fear" of AI. I
find this interesting.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
I'm more of a "Person of Interest" Samaritan kinda guy.

~~~
doldge
I would second this. The way the AI was pervasive and controlling, without
ever being obvious / well-known.

Definitely an underrated show, and one I suspect that more or less nailed its
predictions of how AI will eventually be used/abused to control and manipulate
populations.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It also nailed Snowden leaks before they actually happened!

I also recommend watching Person of Interest. It's a really in-depth
discussion of issues a superhuman AI could create within the level of
technology we enjoy today, as well as ethical problems relating safe AI and
people's right to determine their own fate.

------
hiddencost
The problem with this is that it's exactly the setting for GANs, which means
that if you get your hands on one it's trivial to train your models to defeat
it.

~~~
david-gpu
I wouldn't say trivial. First, in order to use GAN training you need access
not only to the adversarial discriminator, but also to it's derivatives.
Second, the derivatives need to be reasonably bounded and reasonably smooth,
otherwise your voice generator won't be able to converge to a successful
solution.

~~~
Houshalter
You don't really need access to the other model. By just using your own NN as
a discriminator, it will train to be very good at fooling it. And so it should
be just as good at fooling other NNs.

------
stretchwithme
Imagine an AI that asks you questions in order to identify you over the phone.
What's to keep that same AI from pretending to be you with those same
responses?

We really need to beef up authentication. We all should be using multi-step
authentication, with the number of steps increasing with the importance of the
identification.

Maybe 2-step is okay to get to your email TODAY. But maybe 4-step will be
needed in 2027.

And to sell your house, maybe you need 5-step authentication, with some of
those steps involving humans.

------
laretluval
Business model: company A markets the best possible discriminators, and
colluding company B markets the best possible generators.

It's a GAN powered by capitalism!

~~~
Eridrus
You don't really need collusion for this to work :)

------
fudged71
I work for a company that provides automated voice calls that use real voices.
You'd be surprised how often people think it's a real person even though the
voice is not responding to them or speaking conversationally.

I think that's the fundamental problem here. It doesn't matter if it's a real
voice or not. It's about the content of what's being said.

------
libeclipse
I doubt this is more accurate than humans are, or is that possible?

Wouldn't an AI that can be a judge in a Turing test be able to pass the Turing
test?

Or is this just testing how "real" the voice sounds?

~~~
gargravarr
> Wouldn't an AI that can be a judge in a Turing test be able to pass the
> Turing test?

I changed my mind. I don't want the Red Pill anymore. Ignorance is bliss.

~~~
djanatan
This is how I feel too. This is getting out of control.

~~~
beachbum8029
The best part is that we haven't yet seen a half of a percent of what AI's are
capable of. Strap on your seat-belts because Kansas is going bye-bye.

------
castis
If it works it would make an excellent tool for training models that generate
synthetic voices.

------
iza
The key part of this is the software to detect synthetic voices. Seems a bit
overeager to jump straight to a dedicated wearable device when it could just
be implemented as an app.

------
zitterbewegung
I like the concept and it sounds pretty neat! The method of notifying a person
using temperature is something that I haven't seen in a wearable design. I
hope that they opensource or release the Anti-AI app standalone (without the
Bluetooth device I supposed you could have just a regular notification). I
might build the notification system that they use since they have a PCB to
experiment with it with wearable computers.

------
btbuildem
So, would Stephen Hawking be considered a false positive?

~~~
omginternets
His voice is synthetic, so no. This is not a Turing Test.

------
hacker_9
I think we can do this just fine by ourselves actually. Everything neural nets
has produced so far is distinctively non human. From the generated images and
speech to how they play Go oddly or navigate a 3d world poorly.

~~~
StavrosK
> to how they play Go oddly

I think you misspelled "better" there.

~~~
hacker_9
No if you watch the Go matches, AlphaGo did a lot of things that the
professional commentator found odd, but they ended up working out. I expect if
you saw similar odd tactics in the future you could guess you were playing an
AI.

~~~
StavrosK
What does it mean that the commentator found odd? AlphaGo won, and the fact
that the commentator didn't understand what it was doing doesn't mean there
wasn't a purpose behind them.

You don't seem to be realizing that AlphaGo plays "oddly" like a chess
grandmaster plays "oddly" against a new player. The "oddness" is that it's so
good that we can barely understand its game.

~~~
arcticfox
You're creating a false dichotomy. AlphaGo plays both oddly (definition: "in a
way that is different from what is usual or expected") and better.

The real point that I think hacker_9 missed is that AlphaGo was not trying to
play like a human, it was trying to play better. If it tried to play like a
human, it's quite likely that it would be indistinguishable.

~~~
Operyl
In the latest matches, though, you'll find that some of the odd things that
AlphaGo did ends up being adopted by the Go community. So are we now playing
oddly, or did AlphaGo simply teach us?

------
bingojess
I expect it would be much harder to judge whether text (instead of
audio/speech) has been written by a machine

~~~
kmicklas
I think the opposite, WaveNet already sounds basically human to me but after
more than a few sentences no computer generated text looks real.

------
stretchwithme
If AI has patterns identifiable to AI, it can also avoid those same patterns.

------
Animats
How does this do against a Vocaloid?

------
gargravarr
Correct me if I'm wrong, but have humans just automated the Turing Test?

~~~
nkrisc
If you have computers on both sides of the turing test, how do you know which
one you're testing?

~~~
drdeca
One side will say whether the other side is human or not. The other side is
being tested with a Turing test.

