Before you read on, give this recording a listen.
Did you give it a listen? Good, it was an important demonstration. For the skim readers, what I said was:
Hey, it’s Dan. Here’s the good news: we’re living in the future, and it’s a place full of exciting possibilities. The bad news? This isn’t Dan. This is an AI duplicating Dan’s voice using a script Dan wrote. The voice was able to be generated with as little as 150 words of audio sampling. Scary, right? The truth is technology is moving quickly, but we’re often slow to change in response. How many of us are still using the same password we thought of twenty years ago? Probably more of us than we’d like to admit. Yet, with advances in AI and technology, it’s becoming easier and easier for criminals to imitate us in order to gain access to our private information. So, we have to stay a few steps ahead. Here at MY Wealth Planners, we’ll be implementing some additional security updates. We won’t share them here in a public forum, but expect as we get into our Q1 meetings that we’ll want to discuss this in person. If you’re a remote client or someone who lives out of state, we’ll be in touch soon with instructions on how to provide some additional verification information for security purposes.
Did you notice all the small details? The tiny breaths that must have been caught in the sampling? The sound of a Microsoft Outlook notification in the background? It even had an awkward pause at one point towards the end. Sounds pretty darn real, doesn’t it?
Security Updates
So what do you take from the AI-generated recording? Simply put, AI is already and is quickly growing as a major security threat. The normal verifications we use such as voices or even seeing each other are rapidly being replicated by AI. For years already, an early AI concept for video editing called a “deep fake” has seen famous actor’s faces applied to other people’s bodies and in still images the editing between AI and photoshop has gotten so far that it’s not unfair to say that you can’t really believe your eyes. Still, we have to take meaningful steps for the security of our information and our finances. So, as we said in the recording, if you’re a client, expect just to talk to you about these security updates over the next several months. We want to ensure not only that you have a wealth plan for the future, but that it’s well protected. Risk management is more than diversification and insurance, after all!