This Dystopian Device Warns You When AI is Trying to Impersonate Actual Humans

Scared of a future where you can no longer discern if you're dealing with a human or a computer? A team of Australian researchers have come up with what they call the Anti-AI AI.

The wearable prototype device is designed to identify synthetic speech and alert the user that the voice they're listening doesn't belong to a flesh-and-blood individual. Developed as a proof of concept in just five days, the prototype makes use of a neural network powered by Google's Tensorflow machine learning software.

As artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic technology rapidly evolve, we're facing an uncertain future where machines can seemingly do all sorts of things better than people can – from mastering games to working our jobs, and even making new, more powerful forms of AI.

While the gravest concerns envision a future dystopia where unregulated, super-powerful AIs threaten humanity's very existence, the truth is we're already entering a new, unsettling era in which machines can deceive humans by impersonating the ways we speak and look.

As this technology gets even more sophisticated, it's becoming easier to imagine a world where soon it may be difficult or even impossible to tell when a 'person' you're talking to on the phone – or watching on TV – is or isn't a real human being.

But while AI is what empowers this nightmare scenario, it could also be what helps us reveal these synthetic impostors for what they are.

A team at Australian creative technology agency DT trained its AI up on a database of synthetic voices, teaching the offline network to recognise artificial speech patterns.

When the wearable prototype operates, it captures audio spoken in the device's presence and sends it to this neural network in the cloud. If the AI detects an actual human voice (code green), all is fine.

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