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“Not all voice actors are celebrities or well-known voices,” said Tim Friedlander, President of the National Association of Voice Actors and voice of CBS’s Professional Bull Riders. “Most are blue collar, working class voice actors who are working 40 plus hours a week. Over 60% of the voice actors are located outside of LA and New York. We’re not anti-tech or anti-AI, as many have said before.” There are many perspectives on generative AI...

You’ve heard about the deceptive tactics of government imposters. According to a proposed FTC settlement, a Florida company made misleading Made in USA claims, falsely described itself as “veteran-operated,” and didn’t live up to its promise to donate 10% to military charities. It looks like Uncle Sam needs to watch out for an imposter we call Uncle Sham.

Today, the FTC is announcing the Voice Cloning Challenge to address the present and emerging harms of artificial intelligence- or “AI”-enabled voice cloning technologies. Speech synthesis has been around for several decades. [1] Perhaps one of the most famous examples is CallText 5010, the robotic-sounding speech synthesizer [2] Stephen Hawking used after he lost his voice in 1985. And now, going beyond digital voices like Hawking’s and Apple’s...

Cloud computing has emerged and grown significantly over the recent decades – from its infancy in 2004, to a $576 billion industry in 2023. [1] FTC’s Office of Technology, Bureau of Competition, and Bureau of Consumer Protection worked together to examine four specific areas of cloud computing through a Request for Information (RFI) and a public panel of cloud computing experts. These areas included competition, single points of failure, security...

Consumers speak many languages and unfortunately scammers are conversant in all of them. That’s why the FTC has reinforced its fraud fighting capabilities by collecting scam reports in multiple languages . As a member of the business community, you can lend a hand by sharing these new resources with employees, friends, and others in your network. To report in Mandarin, Tagalog, Vietnamese, French, Arabic, Korean, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, and...

We’ve warned professionals about online job scams involving phony “recruiters” who falsely claim to represent big-name businesses. Employment impersonators are still at it, but this time they’re approaching people with bogus offers to be “brand ambassadors” for well-known consumer products companies.

Scammers are hiding in plain sight on social media platforms and reports to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network point to huge profits. One in four people who reported losing money to fraud since 2021 said it started on social media. [1] Reported losses to scams on social media during the same period hit a staggering $2.7 billion, far higher than any other method of contact. And because the vast majority of frauds are not reported, this figure...

Sometimes being the “Home of . . .” is an honorific to be proud of. Kudos, Cleveland, for rock ‘n’ roll, and thank you, Buffalo, for your contribution to chicken wings. But the Birthplace of Frauds and Scams isn’t a nickname to be envied. According to an FTC Data Spotlight , reports from consumers suggest that in many instances, that’s becoming a moniker for social media. The Data Spotlight reveals that the most frequently reported losses to...

Over the last several years, artificial intelligence (AI)—a term which can refer to a broad variety of technologies, as a previous FTC blog notes—has attracted an enormous amount of market and media attention. That’s in part because the potential of AI is exciting: there are opportunities for public progress by enhancing human capacity to integrate, analyze, and leverage information. But it’s also, perhaps in larger part, because the introduction...

Preparing for an emergency used to be an easier task for small businesses. Coastal companies could plan for hurricane season and northern businesses could expect a blizzard or two every winter. But businesses now face a host of other potentially disruptive disasters – wildfires, power outages, public health emergencies, and cyberattacks, to name just a few. Don’t let National Preparedness Month come to a close without updating your company’s plan...