Don’t clone your own voice

Google just turned voice cloning into a one-tap Gemini feature.

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Let’s dive into today’s topic:

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Don’t clone your own voice

Regulators worldwide have been warning against voice-cloning for years.

Why it matters

Google now lets anyone record a short video to build a permanent AI clone of their face and voice inside Gemini, then have it say whatever they type. It’s the most mainstream this technology has ever been.

I’m wary of any feature that makes identity reproducible in a few taps. Tools like ElevenLabs have offered voice cloning for years, and law enforcement well beyond Silicon Valley has been responding to it for almost as long.

• The FTC flagged AI-cloned emergency calls impersonating family members back in 2023.

• Closer to home, the European Parliament’s own research service reported that deepfake voice scams are escalating rapidly. Europol now tracks AI-enabled voice and video fraud as one of the fastest-growing organised crime categories in the EU.

Generated with Gemini.

How it works

Every avatar and voice clone works the same way, regardless of which company built it or which country it’s used in: feed a system enough clean audio of someone talking, and it learns to generate new sentences in that voice.

Gemini needs a short recording of your face and voice through your phone, and currently requires you to be 18 or older with a paid Google AI plan. Other tools ask for less: a public voice note, an interview clip, or a Story archived for 24 hours is usually enough raw material.

Barrington et al (2025) found listeners could only correctly identify a cloned voice as fake around 60% of the time, and mistook a clone for the real speaker roughly 80% of the time.

Here’s how that could impact artists:

• Fans get targeted: A convincing video or voice note from “you” asking for money is far more persuasive than a text scam.

• Family and dating fraud: The exact scheme the FTC first flagged in 2023 as an AI-cloned emergency call.

• Business impersonation: In Hong Kong, a finance worker transferred $25.6 million after joining a video call where every other “colleague,” including the CFO, turned out to be an AI deepfake built from public footage.

• Unconsented commercial use: YouTuber Jeff Geerling found a company narrating its own product videos in a voice cloned from his channel, without ever asking him.

Yes, but..

The FBI’s fraud guidance recommends limiting how much of your voice and image you post online in the first place, which is obviously something most artists can’t comply with.

And avatars and voice-AI are undeniably cool when in the hands of creative people:

• It could help artists reach other markets by dubbing into other languages, or by recording a scripted intro for five markets overnight.

• Creating videos with AI becomes much easier; every situation artists want to place themselves in is just a prompt away.

• Artists can take it even further by creating direct-to-fan video and audio messages on a large scale.

• And obviously, artists can use their cloned voice to create music in new ways.

For most artists, most of their voice is already out there. So maybe my advice isn’t applicable to artists at all, and artists should take full advantage of this new technology and create an avatar and clone their voice today.

Take action now

Artists can agree on a spoken code word with their team and family, the same low-tech fix regulators keep recommending against cloned emergency calls.

Your thoughts

Further reading

• I Cloned Myself With Gemini’s AI Avatar Tool. The Result Was Unnervingly Me (Wired)

• I made a Gemini avatar of myself. It’s so real, it creeps me out (PC World)

• Create and use an avatar in Gemini Apps (Google Gemini Help)

• Scammers use AI to enhance their family emergency schemes (FTC)

• Scam calls in times of Generative AI (European Parliamentary Think Tank)

• Barrington, S., Cooper, E. A., & Farid, H. (2025). People are poorly equipped to detect AI-powered voice clones. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 11004. (full-text)

• Criminals Use Generative Artificial Intelligence to Facilitate Financial Fraud (FBI)

• Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’ (CNN)

• They stole my voice with AI (Jeff Geerling)

• Autonomous humanoid robots joining the band (The Fanbase Builder)

• Proof of humanity as a marketing metric (The Fanbase Builder)

• Navigating AI beyond the hype in 2026 (The Fanbase Builder)