People are poorly equipped to detect AI-powered voice clones
Source record
barrington-2025-voice-clones· 2025 · Scientific Reports
Evidence tier: B (peer-reviewed-journal) · Verification: verified-fulltext
Bottom line: Listeners judged a commercial voice clone to be the same person as the real speaker about 80% of the time (median 83.3% of real-clone pairs) and identified clones as AI only 60.8% of the time.
Citation
Sarah Barrington, Emily A. Cooper, Hany Farid (2025). People are poorly equipped to detect AI-powered voice clones. Scientific Reports, 15, 11004. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-94170-3
Verification entry (identifiers, resolvers, claims with source locations): /data/citations.json#barrington-2025-voice-clones
Study design
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Design | Online perceptual studies: identity study (same speaker? for real-real, real-clone and different-speaker pairs) and naturalness study (real vs AI classification of single clips); small exploratory follow-up |
| Modality | audio |
| Stimuli | ElevenLabs Instant Voice Cloning clones of 220 real speakers from the DeepSpeak dataset (32 prompts per speaker); identity batches of 44 stimuli |
| Participants (N) | 634 |
| N detail | Identity study n=304; naturalness study n=300 recruited (294 analysed); exploratory follow-up n=30 |
| Topics | human-detection, voice, voice-clone, identity, vishing |
Results
| Metric | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Identity: real-real same-speaker pairs judged same | median 100.0% (IQR 85.7-100.0) | |
| Identity: real-clone pairs judged same speaker | median 83.3% (IQR 69.2-100.0) | abstract: about 80% of the time; 26.6% of listeners said 'same' on every real-clone trial |
| Identity: different real speakers judged same | median 11.1% | |
| Naturalness: real clips correctly classified | 67.4% (SD 14.8) | |
| Naturalness: AI clones correctly classified | 60.8% (SD 16.7) | 21.0% of listeners at or below chance on clones |
Moderators
- Exploratory follow-up: unscripted clips easier than scripted (median 76.7% vs 56.7%)
Limitations
- Unfamiliar speakers
- Single commercial cloning service
- Short clips, online listening
Cited in
- MR-0001: Human Detection of Deepfakes: Accuracy, Bias, Confidence, and Training
- MR-0003: Voice Clones and Synthetic Speech: How Well Do People Detect Them?
Verification
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Status | verified-fulltext |
| Compiler confidence | high |
| Checked on | 2026-10-12 |
| Via | nature.com full text, doi:10.1038/s41598-025-94170-3 |