Technology: The brain detects fake sounds – science.ORF.at

Deepfake techniques can mimic a person's unique voice profile very closely. This is used, for example, in attempted telephone fraud.

For the study, In the journal “Communication Biology” In what was published, the researchers recorded the voices of four male speakers and converted them into fake voices using computer algorithms. 25 people had to decide whether the two sounds they heard were identical or whether one of them was a fake sound.

Different brain activity

In two-thirds of cases, the fake identities were assigned correctly. “This shows that current fake voices do not exactly imitate identity, but have the ability to deceive people's perceptions,” the first author said. Claudia Roswandowitz In a statement from the University of Zurich.

However, the brains of the test subjects showed a different picture: Nucleus accumbens, a component of the reward system, was most active when both sounds people were shown were natural sounds. The auditory cortex, which is responsible for analyzing sounds, was more active when one of the two sounds was a deep voice. People can only be partially fooled by deepfakes, says Roswandowitz.