CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan Fakes Out His Own Parents in Creepy Demonstration of AI Voice Generator

CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan pranked his own parents to demonstrate the creepily convincing technology behind AI voice generators — and had some fun pretending to be some of his colleagues as well.

Deep-fake technology has created funny videos of celebrities, said CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Sciutto, but it also “can pose a serious security risk,” as it’s advanced enough to be able to fake someone’s voice so well “you can even trick their own mom and dad.”

To illustrate this point, O’Sullivan used a AI voice generator to call his parents back in Ireland. Sciutto’s co-anchor Erica Hill commented that Mr. and Mrs. O’Sullivan were very beloved by the CNN staff and she hoped he was “treating them with kid gloves.”

O’Sullivan said his “long-suffering parents” were good sports about it, and while the tech did have “a lot of fun uses like pranking your mom and dad,” there were “potentially dangerous consequences” too.

In the video clip, O’Sullivan can be seen smiling and laughing as he calls his parents with his cell phone on speaker and the AI voice generator mimics his voice. When asked if his voice sounded different, his mother commented that he sounded more “American.” O’Sullivan came clean, told her it was a “voice made by computer,” and apologized to her for the prank.

O’Sullivan also demonstrated how easy it was to create “convincing fakes” with just a few minutes of source material, playing clips of AI voices pretending to be Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper.

“Donie O’Sullivan is a real piece of [bleep],” the fake Cooper voice said.

“Of course, Anderson would never say that about me in reality,” said O’Sullivan, and commented that the AI was better at mimicking Cooper than his own voice, “because Anderson doesn’t have a stupid Irish accent.

“All fun and games here,” said O’Sullivan, “but it’s not hard to see how this can go badly very quickly especially as we go into the 2024 election.”

This technology “gives people the ability to deny reality,” he added, such as letting former President Donald Trump claim that the Access Hollywood tape that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign was fake.

O’Sullivan tweeted out a longer video segment showing more of the phone call with his parents.

Watch above via CNN.

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