How OpenAI Built a Billion-Dollar Ad Engine
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, September 18th. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal. AI voice cloning tools have gotten so good that they can now replicate accents. We're unpacking why your accent might be a security vulnerability. Then OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once called the combination of ads and AI, quote, uniquely unsettling. Now the tech giant is pushing full speed ahead into the advertising world. We'll dive into the company's ad rush. Up first, say you get a call out of the blue from someone claiming to be from your bank. You might be skeptical, but what if the caller sounded just like you? New research shows that generative AI tools can now mimic distinct regional accents, using as little as 10 seconds of audio scraped from social media, podcasts, and other online sources.
And apparently, that subtle sense of familiarity Familiarity is often all it takes to lower our defenses. Journal contributor Heidi Mitchell sat down with us to explain why that is and how you can protect yourself from scams. Heidi, tell us more about this new research on how good people are at differentiating between AI and humans.
So when we hear something that sounds familiar, we just assume that it's real, especially if we have a super specific accent. I spoke to this guy in Scotland. He had 150 people participate in this study and he told them, You're gonna listen to these sentences. And tell me if they're AI or if they're human. And they thought overwhelmingly they really thought that it was human when it sounded Scottish. And then when it sounded Dundonian Scottish, which is practically like another language, they really thought it was a human. Because they thought, how in the world could someone I mean, thirty percent of the city of Dundee speaks this dialect? Even when he gave 'em warnings, they were believing that the Dundonian accent was trustworthy.
Your story also notes that people can be more easily tricked into trusting a voice that sounds like their own accent. Can you tell us more about that?
So an interesting other piece of research that I stumbled upon in working on this piece is this researcher She looked at fourteen episodes of Shark Tank. А ще аналіз the vocal expression of each of those. pitchers that are pitching to those sharks.
Why are AI‑generated accents becoming a security risk?
And she found that the closer that the entrepreneur sounded to one of the panelists, the more likely that panelist is going to make a deal. So it's like, you sound like me, I trust you, I'm gonna give you my money.
So then marrying these two studies together, what does it mean that we're falling for these AI voices?
I mean, unfortunately I think it means we're at the risk of falling for scams more. They can just scale these things up and test them really quickly. Remembering though that scammers don't want to spend a lot of money on any one person. So they're just gonna try and blanket as many people as they can. But basically I think what it's gonna come down to according to the cyber experts that we're gonna have to really think about the story that they're telling rather than the voice they're telling it in, because they'll be able to sound just like your sister, just like your aunt, just like your daughter. And we are gonna need to think, oh, does that make sense what they're asking me to do? Is that something that she would say?
And maybe just hang up and call that person back or text somebody else on a different channel so that you're not following the directions that they ask you to do. Because also when somebody calls you with a scam and it sounds like your mom Which is a pretty common scam these days, your fear kicks in and so you don't think so critically.
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