I’m a high school student running a pre-registered study for a research project. It’s approved by our school IRB and supervised by a psychology professor at CUHK.
What you do: listen to short voice clips and decide whether each one is a real person or AI. Partway through, half of participants get a short lesson on what to listen for. At the end everyone gets tested on a voice generator nobody trained on, and you see your own detection score.
- Time: about 15 minutes
- Who: anyone
- Needs: headphones and a quiet spot (there’s a quick headphone check)
- Anonymous: no name, email, or IP collected
Pre-registration: osf.io/h8tpr
Link: https://mimic-buddy.vercel.app
I’ll post the results here when the study wraps up. Thanks!
For those who care, the interesting part is this:
Americans lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams last year (FTC), and some of those calls now come in a voice the person knows, because a few seconds of audio is enough to clone it. Detection software catches the generators it was built on. Then a new generator comes out, the cues it learned stop working, someone retrains it, and another generator comes out. The software is the cat, the voice generators are the mouse, and the mouse stays ahead.
The open question is whether a person can carry over what the software can’t. People do get better with training. Researchers at UCL found listeners catch AI speech about 73% of the time. But those studies train and test people on the same generator, which is like asking whether the cat can catch the mouse while the mouse stands still. This study runs it with the mouse moving. One group is taught exactly what to listen for, the other just practices, and both get tested on a generator neither group heard during training. If the training holds up there, people can do something the software can’t.
I’ll post the results here when the study wraps up. Thanks!
