"FTC Offers $25,000 Prize for Detecting AI-Enabled Voice Cloning"

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently started accepting submissions for its Voice Cloning Challenge, a public competition with a $25,000 top prize for ideas that protect consumers from the danger of AI-enabled voice cloning for fraudulent activity.  The Challenge was announced in mid-November in an effort to find ways to counter the misuse of voice cloning technology as it becomes more sophisticated due to the improvement of text-to-speech with the help of artificial intelligence.  The FTC noted that AI can be used to clone someone's voice by analyzing an audio clip of the target speaking to extract unique vocal characteristics and then using the training data to generate new speech.  Although voice cloning has legitimate uses, such as personalized text-to-speech services and assistive tools for people with disabilities, threat actors can also use it for fraudulent activities like voice phishing, social engineering, and other types of voice-based scams.  Through the Voice Cloning Challenge, the FTC aims to find a solution that can identify cases of voice cloning with the help of generative AI.  The FTC calls it "an exploratory challenge" that could potentially provide a direction for the risk mitigation effort.  The winning proposal will receive $25,000, and the runner-up will get $4,000.  There are up to three honorable mentions, each awarded with $2,000.  On January 2, the agency started accepting submissions via this portal and will receive ideas for 10 days, until January 12, 08:00 PM EST.  The FTC noted that submissions must include a one-page overview of the proposal and a detailed description of up to 10 pages.  Participants may also include a video to show how their idea works.  All submissions will be judged based on their practical feasibility, impact on corporate accountability and burden on the consumer, and resilience to rapid technological advancements in the field.

BleepingComputer reports: "FTC Offers $25,000 Prize for Detecting AI-Enabled Voice Cloning"