New McAfee tool can detect AI-generated audio
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McAfee is announcing a new tool that helps users figure out whether the audio they are listening to in a video on YouTube, X or any other service is real or a deepfake.
Why it matters: AI companies have released a growing array of tools to generate content, but products that can tell you with any reliability whether content was made with AI remain rare.
How it works: The McAfee Deepfake Detector, as the new software is known, focuses on detecting AI-generated audio within almost any audio or video stream available on a PC.
- When AI-generated audio is detected, McAfee's software throws up a red icon. If a user clicks on it, the program offers additional details about the audio in question.
- Deepfake Detector won't work on content protected with digital rights management, but that content is usually coming from big studios or other large companies.
What they're saying: "The barrier to create AI-generated content has come way down, and consumers don't really have great tools to know whether what they're looking at is potentially generated with AI," McAfee chief technology officer Steve Grobman told Axios.
Yes, but: Deepfake Detector does its work not in the cloud but on a user's computer.
- In today's AI software, that approach is typically reserved for tasks where protecting the privacy of user data is a priority.
Between the lines: While the work Deepfake Detector performs may not be the most important to run locally versus in the cloud, Grobman said McAfee is also looking ahead toward other kinds of AI scans that might be more sensitive.
- As one example, Grobman notes that malware detection could benefit from scanning a wider array of the content someone sees and interacts with. But uploading all that data to the cloud for processing could violate user privacy and demand an impractically high level of bandwidth.
- "We can do a better job by having our analysis look at all the content, but we'd want to do that on device," Grobman said. "Doing everything in the cloud is just not practical; if you can do things locally, you can do it much more efficiently."
What's next: The McAfee tool will be available exclusively on Lenovo Copilot+ PCs through mid-September. McAfee says it expects to make the tool available on other PCs after September.
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect that McAfee (and not Lenovo) says it expects to make the tool available on other PCs after September.
