There have been reports of scammers are using the latest AI deepfake voice clones to sound like family members in distress to swindle relatives out of money.

AI Voice Technology 

The kinds of artificially generated voice technology tools that bad actors could be using for ‘imposter scams’ may include  ElevenLabs, Murf, Play.ht, Respeecher, Resemble, Overdub, ReadSpeaker, Voice.ai, and many more.

How Are Voices Cloned? 

Typically, AI voice cloning software can take a short voice sample of the human voice you want to replicate, analyse it, learn it, and replicate it (instantly). This cloned, ‘deepfake’ voice can then be replicated reading any script provided to it.

How Do These Imposter Scams Work? 

As highlighted in a recent US Washington Post report, a common form of the scam involves the scammers obtaining a short (just seconds) audio sample of a person’s voice (e.g. from YouTube, podcasts, TikTok, Instagram or a Facebook video). The scammer then runs this through voice cloning software and makes a short clip of the person sounding distressed and asking for money to be transferred to help them (e.g. for legal fees). This audio clip is then played down the phone to loved ones (e.g. parents or grandparents) who are duped and react by transferring funds into the bitcoin account (because it’s not traceable) named in the scammer’s audio clip, or named in a follow-up phone call by the scammers.

How Big Is The Problem?

US Federal Trade Commission statistics show that in 2022, the impostor scam was the most frequent type of fraud reported and generated the second-highest losses for those targeted, e.g. out of 36,000 reports, more than 5,000 victims lost $11 million in scams over the phone.

Examples 

Some examples of AI deepfake voice ‘imposter’ scams include:

– A Canadian couple being scammed out of $21,000 following a phone call from someone claiming to be a lawyer who told them their son was in jail for killing a diplomat in a car accident and needed legal fees.

– Ruth Card, a Saskatchewan (Canada) grandmother who (would have) paid $9,400 to help pay legal fees for her grandson (if the bank hadn’t intervened) following a bogus accident explained in an AI fake phone call from her grandson and a call from bogus lawyer on his behalf.

Complicated 

This type of scam is difficult to stop for several reasons, such as:

– There are now so many voice cloning options, many of which are free and don’t require proof of whose voice is being cloned or the customer making the clip.

– The scam phone calls can be made from anywhere in the world.

– It’s difficult to decide which agencies have jurisdiction to investigate which cases if the scammers operate out of different countries

– The bitcoin accounts that money is paid into can’t be traced.

– There’s no insurance to re-imburse victims for the money.

– Courts have not yet decided when/if companies are liable for harm caused by AI deepfake voice technology and AI companies are showing no signs of slowing down the release of new AI services and features.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

Deepfake technology that enables people to generate highly realistic images, videos and audio of people is prevalent and although it presents opportunities (e.g. creating videos or realistic avatars for businesses and special effects in films), it is essentially unregulated and clearly has the potential for misuse, such as the spread of misinformation and fraud.

There are currently fears that the technology is advancing and being made publicly available too quickly and is too far ahead of an assessment of the risks and any regulation (hence the recent open letter including Elon Musk’s signature). Deepfake scams present another real, significant and growing risk to businesses and the advice on receiving such a call should be to try and remain calm and sceptical, have a system in place before funds can be transferred where checks must be made, and to first try to contact the person directly for whom the funds are required. That said, voice cloning technology is incredibly good, scammers can be very convincing, and it is difficult for people to fight a strong emotional response to help their loved ones and friends. Some people believe that more needs to be done in the first instance to make voice cloning software companies have more checks in place and to perhaps become liable in some way if fraud is carried out using their services.

Embattled Chinese owned short-video-sharing platform TikTok has received a £12.7m fine from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for breaching UK data protection law by failing to protect children’s privacy when using the TikTok platform.

Notice Of Intent Issued Last Year

The ICO issued TikTok Inc and TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited (‘TikTok’) with the ‘notice of intent’ (a legal document that precedes a potential fine) back in September 2022.

Issues 

At the time (following an investigation), the ICO’s published its (then provisional) view that TikTok may have breached UK data protection law between May 2018 and July 2020.

The ICO investigation found the company processed the data of children under the age of 13 without appropriate parental consent, failed to provide proper information to its users in a concise, transparent, and easily understood way, and processed special category data, without legal grounds to do so.

How Many? 

The ICO estimates that TikTok allowed as many as 1.4 million UK children under the age of 13 to use the platform in 2020, despite having set 13 as the minimum age to create a TikTok account.

UK Data Protection Law 

Under the UK’s GDPR, platforms that offer information to children under the age of 13 must obtain parental consent before collecting, processing, or storing any personal data of children. This includes information such as their name, address, location, and other identifying information.

GDPR also requires that controllers of personal data must take appropriate measures to ensure that the processing of personal data of children is lawful, fair, and transparent. Additionally, platforms must ensure that the personal data of children is secure and protected from unauthorised access.

Didn’t Abide By The Law 

Speaking about its decision to impose the £12.7b million fine, UK Information Commissioner John Edwards said: “There are laws in place to make sure our children are as safe in the digital world as they are in the physical world. TikTok did not abide by those laws.” 

Disagree 

A TikTok spokesperson is reported to have disagreed with the decision and commented: “We invest heavily to help keep under 13s off the platform and our 40,000 strong safety team works around the clock to help keep the platform safe for our community.”  

However, the spokesperson said the company was “pleased that the fine announced today has been reduced to under half the amount proposed last year” (it was originally proposed to be £27 million!).

Trouble Over TikTok 

This announcement has come at a time when TikTok has faced questions and sanctions from many countries. For example, just some recent setbacks for TikTok have included:

– Banning of the TikTok app from EU, US, Australia, New Zealand, and Indian government devices over privacy and security concerns and a possible link to the Chinese state, plus more trouble on the way in Canada.

– Banning of the app in Italy over data privacy concerns.

– TikTok boss Shou Zi Chew being called to face questions at the US Congress over possible close links between the company and the Chinese state.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

This fine relates to a data protection offence, albeit a serious one because it relates to young users, which dates back several years. Although the fine seems large and TikTok doesn’t fully agree with the decision, the company appears to be pleased that the fine is less than half of the £27 million originally suggested. TikTok has had nothing but bad publicity lately, so this fine is another in a series of difficulties that look set to continue for the company as it is embroiled in both political and privacy arguments in several countries. That said, GDPR applies to all and protecting young social media users has become a very prominent and important issue in recent years as more stories emerge of the harm caused to them, e.g. via damaging online content, bullying, grooming and abuse. Protecting the personal data of children is something that arguably, many social media platforms could be much better at and the UK’s Online Safety Bill is another mechanism that this country’s government is using to force social media platforms and chat apps to take their responsibilities more seriously. Data protection issues aside, TikTok is likely to face more hostility going forwards while the West’s relationship with China remains poor.

Following the news that a student made a successful appeal against a parking ticket by using a letter written by the ChatGPT chatbot, we look at how it happened, how to get the best results from ChatGPT, and we look at some of the recent concerns about the advances in AI technology.

£60 Parking Ticket 

22-year-old York student Millie Houlton received a £60 parking notice recently from York City Council.

Although she strongly believed that the fine (for parking in her own street) had been issued in error because she had a permit to do so, she turned to the ChatGPT chatbot for help in writing a letter of appeal against the parking ticket by giving it the instructions “please help me write a letter to the council, they gave me a parking ticket”. 

Miss Houlton has been reported as saying about ChatGPT’s response to her instructions that: “I put in all my details about where and when it happened, why it was wrong and my reference for the fine and it came back with this perfectly formed personalised response within minutes.”

Fine Withdrawn 

After sending off ChatGPT’s appeal letter, she was surprised and delighted to receive a response from the council telling her that the parking fine had been withdrawn.

Help From ChatGPT 

This story shows one of the many valuable uses of an advanced conversational chatbot. ChatGPT can assist a person in writing responses to many different types official or legal letters and notices by providing relevant information and language that is appropriate for the situation. If you’d like to use ChatGPT in this way, here are tips to help you get the best possible letter from it:

– Provide context: Start by providing ChatGPT with the relevant details about the letter or notice you received. This could include the sender, the date of the letter, and the nature of the request or issue.

– Provide the text of the letter or notice: You can copy and paste the text of the letter or notice into the chat with ChatGPT. This will allow it to analyse the language used and provide suggestions for how to respond.

– Provide any relevant information: If there is any information that you think is relevant to the situation, be sure to provide it to ChatGPT. This could include documentation, receipts, or other evidence.

– Use ChatGPT’s suggestions: Based on the information you provide, ChatGPT can generate a response that is appropriate for the situation. It can suggest language to use and provide guidance on the tone and style of the response.

– Edit and refine: Once ChatGPT has provided a response, you can edit and refine it to make sure that it accurately reflects your position and addresses the issues at hand. You may need to make adjustments to the wording or tone to ensure that your response is appropriate for the situation.

Beware 

It is worth remembering however, that however plausible ChatGTP’s output appears to be, it can have some shortcomings.

As an AI language model, ChatGPT is programmed to generate responses based on the patterns and information it has learned from the large corpus of data it was trained on. Like any machine learning model therefore, ChatGPT makes mistakes, produces incorrect or irrelevant information, and even generates and shares misinformation or disinformation, especially if it is fed with biased or unreliable data.

It is also important to remember that ChatGPT does not have the ability to verify the accuracy of the information it generates or assess the reliability of its sources. The chatbot has been designed and trained to mimic human language, but obviously does not have consciousness, intention, or moral values. This means that although it is not capable of intentionally lying or deceiving (as far as we know), it can nevertheless produce misleading or false information (especially if the input data is biased or incomplete).

Privacy Concerns 

There are also concerns that ChatGPT may not be compliant with GDPR’s privacy guidelines, and this has led to ChatGPT being banned in Italy. The Italian data watchdog’s concerns centre around:

– Whether there is a legal basis for the mass collection and storage of personal data to be used for ‘training’ the chatbot’s algorithms.

– Whether the inability to verify the age of ChatGPT users could result in minors being exposed to unsuitable answers compared to their degree of development and awareness.

What To Do 

To avoid sharing a ChatGTP output (e.g. an important letter) that isn’t accurate, users should evaluate, fact-check, and cross-check the information with other reliable sources before using the response for any critical or important decision-making.

Also, to minimise the risk of misinformation or disinformation, it is recommended to use ChatGPT in conjunction with basic human critical thinking, human judgment, alongside other reliable sources of information, plus to try and ensure that the input data is accurate, complete, and comes from a variety of reputable sources.

To minimise the risk of privacy issues, ChatGPT users should not share personal, private, and identifiable information with the chatbot.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

It’s still early days for the mass usage of powerful conversational chatbots – ChatGTP was only introduced in November, but search engines like Bing have already incorporated OpenAI’s chatbot technology, Google Bard is about to be introduced and Copilot is being integrated with Windows 365. Having access to the incredible capabilities and versatility of chatbots like ChatGPT has revealed many possibilities, e.g. getting parking tickets revoked (chatbots can pass legal exams).

Businesses have found that ChatGPT has saved them time, money, and helped them avoid the drudgery of some work.

Others, however, such as the 1,000 AI experts (including Elon Musk) who signed an open letter calling on all AI development to be paused for six months, are concerned that conversational chatbot technology is going too fast and could be exposing people, businesses and even humanity to existential risk. These concerns have, no doubt, been heightened with the news that OpenAI’s  GPT-5 is scheduled to complete training this December and it is so powerful that OpenAI expects to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) whereby its chatbot could perform any intellectual task that a human being can!

There are also concerns that as much as chatbots can help with work, they could also threaten jobs or be used for malicious purposes, so while although the UK government has no plans for a UK AI regulator, it does plan to regulate artificial intelligence with new guidelines on “responsible use”. That said, it also recognises the contribution to the economy of AI.

The next few months look like being an exciting (or terrifying) and undoubtedly disruptive period as more businesses discover just how many unexpected ways that ChatGPT and other chatbots can be used to help them to add value and reduce costs.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden say that if an electric car charges while driving, the size of the battery can be reduced by up to 70 per cent.

Aim Of The Study? 

The aim of the Chalmers University study was to discover what potential benefits there might be with a so-called electric road system (ERS) where cars charge while driving.

What Is An ERS? 

An electric road system (ERS) is a transportation infrastructure that allows electric vehicles (EVs) to charge their batteries while driving on the road. The technology works by installing conductive materials, such as overhead cables or conductive strips, on the road surface that are connected to an electricity grid. These materials can transfer power to electric vehicles fitted with special equipment, such as a pantograph, which collects the energy and charges the vehicle’s battery.

ERS technology has the potential to significantly reduce the need for large batteries and charging infrastructure, making EVs more practical for long-distance travel. The system can also help to reduce carbon emissions from transportation by promoting the use of electric vehicles. Several countries, including Sweden and Germany, have already begun testing ERS technology on highways and major roads.

The Data 

For the study, the researchers combined the so-called electric road system with real-life driving patterns of Swedish drivers and used data from over 400 passenger cars to study real driving patterns on different parts of Swedish national and European roads.

The data was used to calculate, among other things, the battery size needed to complete all journeys given possible charging options i.e., stationary versus electric road system (ERS), charging patterns, and total costs including infrastructure and batteries.

The Optimal Situation 

The researchers concluded that a combination of electric roads on 25 per cent of the busiest national and European roads, and home charging would be the optimal level that would enable batteries to become significantly smaller, at best only one-third of the current size.

What Would This Mean For Motorists? 

As pointed out by Sten Karlsson, one of the researchers behind the study, “We see that it is possible to reduce the required range of batteries by more than two thirds if you combine charging in this way. This would reduce the need for raw materials for batteries, and an electric car could also become cheaper for the consumer.”  The researchers found that the net savings for the car owner from smaller batteries would exceed the cost of the electric road system (ERS).

Also, peaks in electricity consumption could be reduced if car drivers didn’t entirely rely on home charging i.e., charging more evenly throughout the day would mean that peak load would be significantly reduced.

It Depends Where You Live 

Researchers also discovered, however, that that there are major differences between groups, depending on driving patterns and proximity to electric roads. Even in the optimal case, some would manage with only electric road charging, while others, such as those who live in sparsely populated areas would not be able to use the opportunity at all. For example, researcher Wasim Shoman said: “those who live in the countryside would need almost 20 per cent greater range on their batteries compared to those who live in a city centre”. 

What Does This Mean For Your Organisation? 

Although there have been some trials, there is no operational electric road system (ERS) in the UK as yet, there were only 38982 public electric vehicle charging points across the UK by the end of February (Zap Map), and most homes don’t have their own electric vehicle charging points. This means that although the research shows that a combination of home charging and ERS could bring down the battery size and make electric cars cheaper to buy and put less of a strain on the grid at certain times, this situation is still some way off. The more electric cars and the closer the UK can move toward a functional ERS, the more chance it has of decarbonising transportation which would benefit all and help the UK meet its green targets.

Microsoft Is Founded

Bill Gates originally wanted to become a lawyer, like his father, when he was a young child.

However, as he grew up he discovered computers and on this week in history (4th April back in 1975) he, along with his school-friend Paul Allen founded “Micro-Soft” as it was called back then. Whilst they coding in BASIC for little projects, their big break came when Bill used a little cunning ploy to ascertain a market opportunity. He reached out to Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) and let them believe that a number of people were writing code for their Altair 8800 microprocessor machine and suggested they could have a demonstration of it if they wanted.

The clever/cunning/devious part was that there was no BASIC written for the machine at that time and Gates was simply fishing to ascertain any appetite they may have. Upon being granted an interview/demonstration-opportunity, he then frantically organised getting the code written for an Altair emulator in time to impress MITS for the fateful demonstration … then got a deal that started them on their meteoric journey.

Since then, Microsoft has acquired a total of 213 companies, with 39 of those acquisitions taking place within the past five years alone and Bill Gates now has a net worth of over $110 Billion dollars, despite not working full-time at Microsoft for quite some time and concentrating more and more time with other issues and philanthropic works (depending on what/whom you believe).

The moral of the story? It’s a good idea to test you have a hungry market first before you build the product. It can also be good idea to outsource the production (e.g. coding) to allow yourself time to rapidly build your business …