It's the attack of the voice clones from American Public Media.

This is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

Earlier this year, AI Company 11 labs signed a deal with the estates of several deceased actors

to basically create AI voice clones of them.

You can use the clones to narrate books, PDFs, or any text on your phone using 11 Labs

reader app, including AI versions of James Dean,

Bert Reynolds, and Judy Garland.

At that moment, Dorothy saw lying on the table the silver shoes that had belonged to the

Witch of the East.

These voice clones are getting harder to tell apart from their human sources.

Thanks to AI, it's possible to de-age an actor's voice, translate the language, or replace a voice lost to illness. But the technology is also increasingly being used by criminals to impersonate a loved one, extort money, or compromise bank accounts.

It's changing how we communicate with each other and trust each other, as the BBC's Nicholas Stanbridge reports.

Respeecher is a Ukrainian AI company at the forefront of cloning speech that's indistinguishable from a human voice.

They've worked on Disney's Obi-1 Canobi, cloning James Earl Jones's voice for Darth Vader.

The company also helped win an Emmy Award for turning an actor's voice into President Nixon in the short film Inevent of Moon Disaster

with Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin know that there is no...

Alex Serdiuk is Rees-Beecher's CEO and founder.

We have a piece of technology that allows change in real time,

meaning a very small delay, several hundred milliseconds,

that would make it quite smooth for a phone conversation.

So we can change our voice on a fly at the moment.

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