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posted by janrinok on Thursday November 24 2016, @09:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the say-what dept.

A new application that promises to be the "Photoshop of speech" is raising ethical and security concerns. Adobe unveiled Project Voco last week. The software makes it possible to take an audio recording and rapidly alter it to include words and phrases the original speaker never uttered, in what sounds like their voice.

One expert warned that the tech could further undermine trust in journalism. Another said it could pose a security threat. However, the US software firm says it is taking action to address such risks.

[...] "It seems that Adobe's programmers were swept along with the excitement of creating something as innovative as a voice manipulator, and ignored the ethical dilemmas brought up by its potential misuse," he told the BBC. "Inadvertently, in its quest to create software to manipulate digital media, Adobe has [already] drastically changed the way we engage with evidential material such as photographs.

"This makes it hard for lawyers, journalists, and other professionals who use digital media as evidence.

"In the same way that Adobe's Photoshop has faced legal backlash after the continued misuse of the application by advertisers, Voco, if released commercially, will follow its predecessor with similar consequences."

The risks extend beyond people being fooled into thinking others said something they did not. Banks and other businesses have started using voiceprint checks to verify customers are who they say they are when they phone in. One cybersecurity researcher said the companies involved had long anticipated something like Adobe's invention.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by BananaPhone on Thursday November 24 2016, @11:05PM

    by BananaPhone (2488) on Thursday November 24 2016, @11:05PM (#432643)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wilson_(reporter)#WTVT_Whistleblower_lawsuit [wikipedia.org]

    ...An appeal was filed, and a ruling in February 2003 came down in favor of WTVT, who successfully argued that the FCC policy against falsification [of news] was not a "law, rule, or regulation",...

    and ever since, the 'news' has lost its Truthiness.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @05:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @05:56AM (#432761)

    Its ironic that you are misrepresenting the case by claiming that it enabled misrepresentation.

    The case, as anyone who reads the full text of the wiki page can see, is not about whether it is legal or not for a news report to lie (of course its legal to lie because 1st amendment). It is about whether or not reporting lies to the FCC qualified as whistleblowing. The court rule that reporting lies does not qualify as whistleblowing.

    By your logic trust in journalism died on the day the bill of rights was ratified because that's when lying became an inalienable right.