The Voice of Reason

What happens when a deceased relative speaks to you through your home assistant device? It might sound like a ghost story tailored for spooky season, but the tech is all too real. So, what happens when we overly humanize technology. More importantly, should we?

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About the author:
Theodore F. Claypoole

Transcript

Welcome to Womble Perspectives, where we explore a wide range of topics, from the latest legal updates to industry trends to the business of law. Our team of lawyers, professionals and occasional outside guests will take you through the most pressing issues facing businesses today and provide practical and actionable advice to help you navigate the ever changing legal landscape.

 With a focus on innovation, collaboration and client service. We are committed to delivering exceptional value to our clients and to the communities we serve. And now our latest episode.

Welcome to the first episode of our October Saturday Series where we’re focusing on data privacy and cybersecurity. While they're two separate issues, the two are often closely intertwined, as is the case of this week’s episode regarding some of the concerns around overly humanizing our technology.

But first, a quick cybersecurity tip. We’re all likely familiar with how a phishing scam works. The attacker sends an email with a link hoping that you’ll click on it which then opens your computer to attack. So how do you avoid becoming a victim? Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

First, check where the email came from. Are there typos in either the name of the sender or the email domain? Keep an eye out for typos and grammatical errors in the subject line and body of the email, too.

Second, is there an urgent call to action in the email? Attackers will often use a sense of urgency to trick you into clicking on a link without thinking.

And third, does the email have an unexpected attachment? Beware of opening the attachment as that will open you up to a cyberattack.

Now, on to the episode.

In this fraught and fractured time, wouldn’t we benefit from some humanizing assurance?

Rather than the tinny machine-generated sounds we absorb from our technology, or the universal impersonal voices chosen by Google, Apple and Amazon, it may be better to interact with comforting people.

The warm baritone of James Earl Jones could be serving up music and weather reports this weekend.

Our joke-a-day app might be enhanced with the absurd cackle of Gilbert Gottfried.

Goodnight Moon could be read to your kids by the voice of their grandfather – even if he passed away in the 1990s – keeping him alive in all of your memories.

We have the technology to make this happen, and tech companies are testing ways to use your favorite voices to respond to your questions and read to your children. While it sounds interesting at first, deeper thought raises serious concerns. Just because we can do this thing, doesn’t mean we should do it. This version of deep fakery may bring comfort to some, while bringing loss, confusion, and emotional ruin to others.

Listening to the voice of a deceased loved one can hold warm memories, but allowing AI to recreate that voice in response to questions in real time is kinda creepy. It can also be confusing and possibly would run counter to the wishes of the person whose voice is being used. If you ask your home assistant questions like “What year did Supertramp have its first number one hit?” and your deceased Aunt Ellie's voice answers back, does that keep a happy memory alive? or does it trivialize your relationship and her mortality? How psychologically healthy can it be to interact with people who were once important in our lives, but now are gone forever? How will children be affected by the responsive voices of people who passed?

This technology has existed for years, and AI can start with relatively small samples of a person’s vocal pattern, build out models of how that voice would sound pronouncing many words, and use the model speech-pattern library to generate an unlimited variety of words in the speaker’s language. This library can then be used to answer questions or read text. Now some companies are considering how to personalize their responses.

The voice-capture and parroting technology unveiled last year at Amazon’s Re:Mars conference in Las Vegas is in development, and could allow the Amazon virtual assistant to sound like any person based on less than a minute of spoken recording of that person’s voice.

But what if that person doesn’t want their voice to serve Amazon as a digital voice slave, saying anything that the company decides it wants you to hear? People could object. Of course, dead people cannot object. There may be commercial reasons for objection, where Barry White may not want his dulcet tones to fill a million bedrooms with interactive discussion for free. Celebrities should be able to sell to their own voices for your home digital operations. But many people would simply find the concept of shilling for Amazon or Apple distasteful and creepy, demanding that their voices to remain within their own control.

According to NBC News' website, “Amazon’s push comes as competitor Microsoft earlier this week said it was scaling back its synthetic voice offerings and setting stricter guidelines to “ensure the active participation of the speaker” whose voice is recreated. Microsoft said Tuesday it is limiting which customers get to use the service — while also continuing to highlight acceptable uses such as an interactive Bugs Bunny character at AT&T stores.” Presumably Mel Blanc or another voice actor has approved this message.

Amazon hopes that interacting with Amazon technology through a familiar voice will build greater trust with Alexa by capturing more "human attributes of empathy and affect." However, this seems like unearned and unwarranted trust. By simply mimicking a human voice that is important to you, Amazon expects the trust you have built in decades with your mother can transfer to Amazon, in what may be viewed as a cynical business move. Yes, the up-selling message is coming from Amazon, but it sounds like Grandma. And you trust Grandma. Don’t you?

The Washington Post notes that bad actors can use this technology to put words in your mouth that you never said. It quoted cybersecurity expert Rachel Tobac as saying, “I don’t feel our world is ready for user-friendly voice-cloning technology. If a cybercriminal can easily and credibly replicate another person’s voice with a small voice sample, they can use that voice sample to impersonate other individuals. That bad actor can then trick others into believing they are the person they're impersonating, which can lead to fraud, data loss, account takeover and more.” It’s easy to imagine that voice deepfakes could fool biometric voice-based security but we don’t know enough about either technology yet to know how they would interact.

This may be a new arena for the growing law and practice of digital estates, where people determine what happens to their electronic and online assets following death. Digital-focused wills can address what happens with online businesses, ecommerce sites, accounts and licenses with third parties, and even personal storage. Add to the list the disposition of your voice digitized in recordings. Do you want anyone to be able to use your voice as an interactive tool? If so, who can do it and who can’t? Or do you want to leave that choice to the executor of your estate or to a selected heir? The effect could be financial for some famous voices – some people will want to continue to hear Walter Cronkite read the news to them every night – and simply a personal decision for others. The decision could even be made on religious grounds.

And whatever happens with your voice could also be applied to your image. Using video of a person speaking can allow an audiovisual deepfake to speak words chosen by others, or even by a machine.

It’s amazing how the realization that we have the tools to further humanize our technology can lead to so many legal and ethical questions. We can perform miracles with our tech. But should we?

Thank you for listening to Womble Perspectives. If you want to learn more about the topics discussed in this episode, please visit The Show Notes, where you can find links to related resources mentioned today. The Show Notes also have more information about our attorneys who provided today's insights, including ways to reach out to them.

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