If you are wary about the rapid spread of artificial intelligence (AI) into seemingly every aspect of modern life, you are not alone. And there is good reason. While AI has demonstrated benefits in business, healthcare, even the environment, scammers are also capitalizing on its capabilities. Which means you need to be on even higher alert about fraud:
The call comes in at 4:40 on a Friday. The voice belongs to a senior manager, or sounds close enough, and she needs a password reset before a flight. She is polite, she is in a hurry, and she has the last four of the badge number.
Researchers at Harvard Kennedy School, Meta and elsewhere ran a version of that moment past 4,100 US adults, using six commercial voice systems and human callers as a control. The results land in an odd place for anyone buying deepfake detection.
Give people a synthetic voice and they’ll call it out most of the time. Watch what those same people did with the real callers. They flagged humans as machines two times out of three. What looks like a detection skill is really a room full of people who’ve decided everyone on the phone might be a robot. Suspicion is up. Accuracy has not moved.
People who use AI tools often scored about the same as people who had never touched one, and voice assistant users scored about the same as everyone else.
The study measured four things about each caller: sentiment, persuasiveness, trustworthiness and human-likeness. Then it checked which ones predicted whether someone would go along with the request.
What moved people was persuasiveness. Each step up the scale raised the odds of compliance by a factor of 2.58. How human the voice sounded stopped mattering once the other measures were accounted for. The one thing every detection vendor sells against did none of the independent work.
Detected AI voices still persuaded people. A caller can sound synthetic, get pegged as synthetic, and still walk away with a credit card security code, because the script is doing the persuading.
Participants in the qualitative interviews said as much. One described a caller as “like a software that’s just reinforcing what the programmer gave it” and kept engaging anyway. Others heard rapid, uneven speech and read it as a nervous call center worker.
Across all five scams, about 16.5% of people said they’d go along with it. The fake-relative-in-trouble version got up to 36.1%, and that’s the number every headline is going to grab.
Here’s the catch. Both of those numbers lump together the people who said “yes” and the people who said “maybe.” Pull the clone scenario apart and only 6.5% actually said yes. Everyone else just hesitated.
Hesitation still matters in a scam. A caller who keeps you on the line gets a second attempt.
For more on AI voice scams, read the full article.
It is important for consumers to remain alert and vigilant in order to protect themselves and their money. It can feel impossible keep up on all the different ways scammers are committing fraud today. But you don't have to know them all. You just need to learn how to recognize the signs. When you understand the methods scammers use, you are better equipped to stop them in their tracks.