Manjeet Rege, software engineering and data science professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering, provided insights on deepfakes to The San Francisco Standard. A recent audio clip of Vice President JD Vance apparently criticizing Elon Musk went viral and is likely fake.
From the story:
The explosive recording, which surfaced Sunday on social media, fueled an already fervid discussion of real tensions between Musk and President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
But artificial intelligence experts interviewed by The Standard are calling BS.
It is “reasonable to conclude that the audio clip is not authentic and was likely created using AI-based voice synthesis technologies,” Manjeet Rege, director of the University of St. Thomas’ Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence, said. Rege cited a low authenticity score returned by Hiya’s deepfake detector and the recording’s questionable origins: a TikTok video that misspelled Vance’s name as “Vence.” ...
“AI tools are super good at catching subtle things that our ears might not pick up,” Rege said. “They analyze the rhythm and pacing of audio, looking for weird pauses or sudden changes that don’t sound like real human speech.”
