It’s the new badge of celebrity status that no one wants. Jennifer Aniston, Oprah Winfrey and Kylie Jenner have all had their voices cloned by fraudsters. Online blaggers used artificial intelligence to spoof the Tigger-esque tone of TV financial adviser Martin Lewis. And this weekend, David Attenborough described himself as “deeply disturbed” when he discovered his cloned voice had been used to deliver partisan US news bulletins.

Now experts have warned that voice cloning is outpacing the law, as technologists hone previously clunky voice generators into models capable of mimicking the subtlest pauses and breaths of human intonation.

Dominic Lees, an expert on AI in film and television who advises a British parliamentary committee, told The Guardian on Monday: “Our privacy and copyright laws are not up to date with what this new technology brings, so there is very little that David Attenborough can do.”

Read is advising the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee on an inquiry into the ethical use of AI in filmmaking. He’s also convening the Synthetic Media Research Network, whose members include the company creating an AI version of the late chat show interviewer Michael Parkinson, which will result in an eight-part unscripted series, Virtually Parkinson, with new guests . That voice cloning project is being carried out with the permission of Parkinson’s family and estate.

“The government should definitely look into voice cloning because it is a major fraud problem,” Lee said. “It needs the stick of government regulation to deter (abuse)… we can’t allow it to be a free for all.”

AI voice cloning scams in Britain have risen by 30% in the past year, according to research from NatWest bank this month. Another lender, Starling Bank, found that 28% of people had been targeted by an AI voice cloning fraud at least once in the past year.

Voice cloning is also reportedly being used by fraudsters to commit a version of the ‘hello mom’ text fraud, where fraudsters pose as children in dire need of money from their parents. On already fuzzy phone lines, it can be difficult to detect that a begging child is a clone of a scammer. Consumers are advised to check this by hanging up and calling back on a trusted number.

People whose voices are cloned without their consent find it more than a nuisance. Attenborough told the BBC on Sunday: ‘Having spent my life trying to speak what I believe to be the truth, I am deeply disturbed to find my identity being stolen by others today. wish.”

When a new voice option on OpenAI’s latest AI model, ChatGPT-4o, contained tones very close to those of actor Scarlett Johansson, she said she was shocked and angry because the voice “sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news media couldn’t tell the difference.”

The rise of cloned voices raises the question of what they are missing in real human tones. Lees said: “The big problem is that AI doesn’t understand emotions and how that changes the way a word or phrase can have an emotional impact, and how you vary the voice to reflect that.”

The voice-over industry, which provides voices for advertisements, animations and instructional training, must respond quickly to technological developments. Joe Lewis, head of audio at London’s Voiceover Gallery, which has provided real human voices for adverts for Specsavers and National Express, said it had already cloned the voices of some of its artists.

He said AI seemed to work best with English male voices, perhaps because that reflected bias in the types of recordings used to train the algorithm, but he cautioned that in general “there is something wrong with the way it is generated which makes you less attentive”.

“When the AI ​​(voice) breathes, it is a very repetitive breath,” he said. “The breaths are in the right place, but they don’t feel natural… (But) can it get to the point where it’s really perfect? I don’t see why not, but it’s still a long way from reaching the full emotional spectrum.”