Real or fake voice? FTC gives you $25,000 if you help solve huge tech challenge of AI era

Modern generative AI tools capable of mimicking the voices of real people are as impressive as they are worrying. For any entertaining or practical application, there is at least one malicious one, from vishing scams to election meddling.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now among those who have noticed and is taking its first action. As reported by Bleeping Computer, earlier this week the commission started to accept submissions for its Voice Cloning Challenge.

The government body hopes to get some useful ideas on how to tackle the fraudulent or unauthorized use of AI-based voice cloning systems. The participants can send their suggestions which address at least one of the following intervention points:

Prevention or authentication: It must provide a way to limit the use or application of voice cloning software by unauthorized users;

Real-time detection or monitoring: It must provide a way to detect cloned voices or the use of voice cloning technology; or

Post-use evaluation: It must provide a way to check if an audio clip contains cloned voices.

Per the rules, all the submissions must contain a brief text description of the proposed solution and its detailed written description.

Judges of the challenge will evaluate the proposals in three main areas: administrability and feasibility to execute; increased company responsibility and reduced consumer burden; and resilience. That means the proposed solution should be relatively easy to implement into practice, taking into consideration the realistic options of AI-tool developers, and as future-proof as possible.

The overall winner of the competition will be awarded $25,000 while the runner-up will receive $4,000. Up to three honorable mentions (one for each intervention point) will get $2,000 each.

However, no result is also a result – although a worrying one – says the FTC. If no viable ideas emerge, it means the technological challenge is harder than expected and should trigger necessary legislation changes to policy the use of such AI tools.

The public competition is open until January 12 with results to be announced in “early 2024”.