The brain responds differently to artificially imitated voices than to real voices. This happens even if people do not recognize the so-called deepfake voices as fake, as shown by a study from the University of Zurich in the journal ‘Communications Biology’.
Deepfake technologies can mimic a person’s unique voice profile very accurately. This is used, for example, in fraud attempts via telephone, the university wrote in a statement on Wednesday.
25 subjects had to recognize deepfake voices
For the study, the researchers recorded the voices of four male speakers and converted them into deepfake voices using computer algorithms. 25 subjects had to decide whether two voices they heard were identical or whether one of them was a deepfake voice.
In two-thirds of the cases, the deepfake identities were correctly assigned. “This makes it clear that current deepfake voices do not perfectly imitate identities, but have the potential to mislead people’s perceptions,” lead author Claudia Roswandowitz said in the statement.
However, the test subjects’ brains showed a different picture: the so-called nucleus accumbens, part of the brain’s reward system, was much more active when both voices shown to the test subjects were, of course, voices. The auditory cortex, which is responsible for analyzing sounds, was more active when one of the two voices was a deepfake voice. The first author concluded that people can only be partially deceived by deepfakes.
Source: Krone
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