PROVIDENCE, R.I. 鈥 The voice Alexis 鈥淟exi鈥 Bogan had before last summer was exuberant.
She loved to belt out Taylor Swift and Zach Bryan ballads in the car. She laughed all the time. In high school, she was a soprano in the chorus.
Then that voice was gone.
Alexis Bogan, center, and her mother Pamela Bogan, right, react to hearing a re-creation of her lost voice from a prompt typed by Dr. Fatima Mirza, left, on聽 March 11 at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, R.I.聽
Doctors in August removed a life-threatening tumor lodged near the back of her brain. When the breathing tube came out a month later, Bogan had trouble swallowing and strained to say 鈥渉i鈥 to her parents. Months of rehabilitation aided her recovery, but her speech is still impaired.
In April, the 21-year-old got her old voice back. Not the real one, but a voice clone generated by artificial intelligence that she can summon from a phone app. Trained on a 15-second time capsule of her teenage voice 鈥 sourced from a cooking demonstration video she recorded for a high school project 鈥 her synthetic but remarkably real-sounding AI voice can now say almost anything she wants.
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Experts have warned that rapidly improving AI voice-cloning technology can amplify phone scams, disrupt democratic elections and violate the dignity of people 鈥 living or dead 鈥 who never consented to having their voice re-created to say things they never spoke.
It鈥檚 been used to produce deepfake robocalls to New Hampshire voters mimicking President Joe Biden. In Maryland, authorities recently charged a high school athletic director with using AI to generate a fake audio clip of the school鈥檚 principal making racist remarks.
But Bogan and a team of doctors at Rhode Island鈥檚 Lifespan hospital group believe they鈥檝e found a use that justifies the risks. She's one of the first people and the first with her condition to work with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to replicate a lost voice.
Dr. Rohaid Ali plays a video from a high school project made by his patient, Alexis Bogan, on March 11 at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, R.I.聽
鈥淲e鈥檙e hoping Lexi鈥檚 a trailblazer as the technology develops,鈥 said Dr. Rohaid Ali, a neurosurgery resident at Brown University鈥檚 medical school and Rhode Island Hospital. Millions of people with debilitating strokes, throat cancer or neurogenerative diseases could benefit, he said.
Bogan had to go back a few years to find a suitable recording of her voice to 鈥渢rain鈥 the AI system on how she spoke. It was a video in which she explained how to make a pasta salad.
Her doctors intentionally fed the AI system just a 15-second clip. Cooking sounds make other parts of the video imperfect. It was also all that OpenAI needed 鈥 an improvement over previous technology requiring much lengthier samples.
Getting something useful out of 15 seconds could be vital for any future patients who have no trace of their voice on the internet. A brief voicemail left for a relative might have to suffice.
When they tested it for the first time, everyone was stunned by the quality of Bogan's voice clone. 鈥淚 get so emotional every time I hear her voice,鈥 said her mother, Pamela Bogan.
Bogan types a few words or sentences into her phone and her custom-built app instantly reads it aloud.
She now uses her AI voice about 40 times a day and sends feedback she hopes will help future patients. One of her first experiments was to speak to the kids at the preschool where she works as a teaching assistant.
She鈥檚 used it at stores to ask where to find items. It鈥檚 helped her reconnect with her dad, who has hearing loss and was struggling to understand her. And it鈥檚 made it easier for her to order fast food.
Alexis Bogan, whose speech was impaired by a brain tumor, uses a mobile phone with an app that features a voice-cloning tool to order a drink at a Starbucks drive-thru April 29 in Lincoln, R.I.聽
鈥淗i, can I please get a grande iced brown sugar oat milk shaken espresso,鈥 said Bogan鈥檚 AI voice as she held the phone out her car鈥檚 window at a Starbucks drive-thru.
鈥淚 think it鈥檚 awesome that I can have that sound again,鈥 she said. It's helping to boost her confidence and restoring a part of her identity she thought she was losing forever.
Bogan鈥檚 doctors have started cloning the voices of other willing Rhode Island patients and hope to bring the technology to hospitals around the world. OpenAI said it is treading cautiously in expanding the use of the tool it calls Voice Engine, which is not yet publicly available.
Other companies with commercially available voice-generation services say they prohibit impersonation or abuse, but they vary in how they enforce their terms of use.
鈥淲e want to make sure that everyone whose voice is used in the service is consenting on an ongoing basis,鈥 said Jeff Harris, OpenAI鈥檚 lead on the product. 鈥淲e want to make sure that it鈥檚 not used in political contexts.鈥
Harris said OpenAI鈥檚 next step involves developing a secure 鈥渧oice authentication鈥 tool so users can replicate only their own voice, with a possible exception for trusted medical providers working with a patient.
While for now she must fiddle with her phone to get the voice engine to talk, Bogan imagines an AI voice engine that improves upon older remedies for speech recovery in melding with the human body or translating words in real time.
She鈥檚 less sure about what will happen as she grows older and her AI voice continues to sound like she did as a teenager. Maybe the technology could 鈥渁ge鈥 her AI voice, she said.
For now, 鈥渆ven though I don鈥檛 have my voice fully back, I have something that helps me find my voice again,鈥 she said.
How many high school and college students are using AI tools?
How many high school and college students are using AI tools?
Since the public launch of Open AI's ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence tools have become widely used by the general public. But one group was particularly quick to embrace the burgeoning technology: teenagers.
According to a by ACT Inc., the creator and administrator of the standardized test for college-bound students, nearly half of the surveyed high school students (46%) reported using AI tools, especially ChatGPT, to help them with their studies.
These generative AI tools鈥攚hich rely on machine learning and neural network technology鈥攃an write code, generate images, and create content that appears convincingly human-produced. They can also recognize patterns in data and learn from new information they encounter, enabling them to perform tasks like writing poems and stories and solving word problems.
These tools have also taken on the function of learning aids, helping students as virtual tutors by summarizing and explaining complex topics and answering complex questions almost instantly. Generative AI tools also help students by serving as a writing clinic, assisting users with brainstorming ideas and structure for essays, papers, and school projects.
Using survey data from the ACT and other sources, looked at how many students use AI to help them with their studies.
AI is relatively popular in writing-based courses
Approximately 74% of the students surveyed believed that taking advantage of artificial intelligence would boost their performance in school assignments.
According to the ACT survey, ChatGPT was the most common AI tool used by students, with 83% of students using AI for schoolwork reporting that they use ChatGPT, followed by Dall-E 2 and Bing Chat.
Language arts was the most common course in which students used AI tools, the ACT report found. AI tools for such courses take advantage of the technology's strengths, especially when it concerns fiction, where the focus is on creativity and structure over factual accuracy.
The ACT report also found an association between academic achievement and the use of AI. Students with higher ACT scores tended to utilize AI tools to help themselves with schoolwork more than their classmates with lower scores.
At the college level, in a study commissioned by Turnitin reported using generative AI for schoolwork. However, only 22% of faculty members surveyed reported using AI tools.
How will AI affect students in the long run?
Despite the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence by students, concerns over AI tools' accuracy and their effect on learning remain.
According to the ACT, 64% of the students who said they did not use AI for assignments reported that they did not trust the tools enough. Among the surveyed students who use AI tools for schoolwork, 63% reported that the content produced by AI tools had inaccuracies.
The use of AI tools poses the risk of making students dependent on them. This could be a problem, especially when AI tools are used to generate arguments and literature reviews. Extreme reliance on these tools often introduces the machine's biases into academic work while disincentivizing students from contributing original perspectives. What's more, the fact that AI tools produce content based on the vast body of content they've been trained on with insufficient attribution makes one using them run the risk of accidental plagiarism.
Despite these concerns, many students (62%) and instructors (58%), believe that, in the long run, 聽in education rather than negative consequences, according to a report from textbook publisher McGraw Hill.
Story editing by Elena Cox. Copy editing by Tim Bruns.
This story originally appeared on Numerade and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
