Authors

* External authors

Venue

Date

Share

Not My Voice! A Taxonomy of Ethical and Safety Harms of Speech Generators

Wiebke Hutiri*

Orestis Papakyriakopoulos*

Alice Xiang

* External authors

FAcct-2024

2024

Abstract

The rapid and wide-scale adoption of AI to generate human speech poses a range of significant ethical and safety risks to society that need to be addressed. For example, a growing number of speech generation incidents are associated with swatting attacks in the United States, where anonymous perpetrators create synthetic voices that call police officers to close down schools and hospitals, or to violently gain access to innocent citizens' homes. Incidents like this demonstrate that multimodal generative AI risks and harms do not exist in isolation, but arise from the interactions of multiple stakeholders and technical AI systems. In this paper we analyse speech generation incidents to study how patterns of specific harms arise. We find that specific harms can be categorised according to the exposure of affected individuals, that is to say whether they are a subject of, interact with, suffer due to, or are excluded from speech generation systems. Similarly, specific harms are also a consequence of the motives of the creators and deployers of the systems. Based on these insights we propose a conceptual framework for modelling pathways to ethical and safety harms of AI, which we use to develop a taxonomy of harms of speech generators. Our relational approach captures the complexity of risks and harms in sociotechnical AI systems, and yields a taxonomy that can support appropriate policy interventions and decision making for the responsible development and release of speech generation models.

Related Publications

A Taxonomy of Challenges to Curating Fair Datasets

NeurIPS, 2024
Dora Zhao*, Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Pooja Chitre*, Jerone Andrews, Georgia Panagiotidou*, Shawn Walker*, Kathleen H. Pine*, Alice Xiang

Despite extensive efforts to create fairer machine learning (ML) datasets, there remains a limited understanding of the practical aspects of dataset curation. Drawing from interviews with 30 ML dataset curators, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of the challenges and trade…

Resampled Datasets Are Not Enough: Mitigating Societal Bias Beyond Single Attributes

EMNLP, 2024
Yusuke Hirota, Jerone Andrews, Dora Zhao*, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos*, Apostolos Modas, Yuta Nakashima*, Alice Xiang

We tackle societal bias in image-text datasets by removing spurious correlations between protected groups and image attributes. Traditional methods only target labeled attributes, ignoring biases from unlabeled ones. Using text-guided inpainting models, our approach ensures …

Efficient Bias Mitigation Without Privileged Information

ECCV, 2024
Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga*, Swami Sankaranarayanan, Jerone Andrews, Zohreh Shams, Mateja Jamnik*, Alice Xiang

Deep neural networks trained via empirical risk minimisation often exhibit significant performance disparities across groups, particularly when group and task labels are spuriously correlated (e.g., “grassy background” and “cows”). Existing bias mitigation methods that aim t…

  • HOME
  • Publications
  • Not My Voice! A Taxonomy of Ethical and Safety Harms of Speech Generators

JOIN US

Shape the Future of AI with Sony AI

We want to hear from those of you who have a strong desire
to shape the future of AI.