“I am profoundly disturbed.”
Velvet Voice
After discovering that his voice has been cloned by artificial intelligence, veteran documentarian David Attenborough has been moved to genteel fury.
In a new BBC segment, two near-identical clips — one generated by AI, the other recorded by the twice-knighted man himself — are heard promoting Attenborough’s new special, “Asia.”
According to host Kasia Madera, the first of the two segments was an AI clone that the broadcaster’s researchers found online. The actual Attenborough is less than pleased.
“Having spent a lifetime trying to speak what I believe to be the truth,” Attenborough told the BBC in a statement, “I am profoundly disturbed to find that these days, my identity is being stolen by others and greatly object to them using it to say whatever they wish.”
Strangely enough, the AI Attenborough also had a response to the story.
“Let’s set the record straight. Unless Mr. Attenborough has been moonlighting for us in secret and under an assumed name with work authorization in the United States, he is not on our payroll,” the AI voice clone intoned. “I am not David Attenborough. We are both male, British voices for sure. However, I am not David Attenborough, for anyone out there who may be confused.”
This creepy rebuttal sounded so much like the real thing that Madera suggested the average person would be unable to tell the difference.
“You have to really double-take,” the host said. “I wouldn’t know if I didn’t know.”
Post-Truth
Beyond simply being unsettling, this faked Attenborough voice is particularly insidious because of the documentarian’s societal role as one of the premier global truth-tellers of the last few generations.
In an editorial for The Guardian, columnist Zoe Wiliams suggested that such a lifelike AI rendition of a voice like Sir David’s could imperil the concept of truth as we — or at least, as the Brits — know it.
“Attenborough may not be the last true embodiment of trust in a compromised world, but I row back from that assertion only because I fear it is UK-centric,” she opined. “I stand by this: if you can’t hear his voice and believe it, then you can’t hear or believe anything.”
“In fake Attenborough, the scam of all scams, we have been casually mugged of modern communication,” Williams concluded. Given that the knight’s AI voice clone nearly tricked a BBC reporter, we have to say we agree.
More on voice cloning: Before He Died, James Earl Jones Signed Paperwork to Voice Darth Vader Using AI
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