The OpenAi CEO, Sam Altman, has expressed a great concern about how artificial intelligence is quickly undermining the traditional identity verification methods, particularly in financial and security systems.
Speaking about the panorama of threats in evolving, Altman said he is alarmed that some financial institutions still depend on the voice footprints for authentication, a method that believes that it has already been ineffective by AI capabilities.
“One thing that terrifies me is that some banks still accept voice footprints to verify the identity,” he said. “The AI has completely broken that method.” Altman explained that although passwords still offer a certain level of security, the most modern and most convenient forms of authentication, such as voice recognition or facial selfies, are no longer reliable in an era of powerful generative tools of AI.
He warned of a wave of imminent fraud, since the tools capable of imitating human voices and appearances become more accessible and sophisticated. “We have tried, and others in the technological community have also tried to alert people. A bad actor could easily use these tools. It is not difficult to do, and will come very soon,” Altman said.
He pointed out recent incidents involving rescue scams where criminals use voices generated by the loved ones of a victim, such as a child or a father, to create urgent and credible scenarios on the phone. These tactics, Altman warned, are about to be even more convincing with the introduction of video calls generated by AI that are almost impossible to distinguish from the real ones.
“This will become so convincing that society needs to fundamentally rethink how we authenticate people,” he emphasized. “Soon, a simple voice call or even a facetime may not be reliable. We need to prepare people for a world where traditional ways of verifying identity no longer work. The impact of this on fraud and security is massive.
