ElevenLabs used for Russian propaganda

Technology by AI voice start-up, ElevenLabs (backed by a16z and Nay Friedman) has been used, once again, to spread fake news.

In January, this year, political activists used its AI voice cloning technology to produce a robocall—impersonating President Joe Biden—which called people in New Hampshire and told them not to vote in the Primary elections.

According to threat intelligence company Recorded Future, its technology has now been used by a Russian-based organization—the Social Design Agency—as part of a campaign, called ‘Operation Undercut’, to spread misleading and fake “news” videos about Ukraine.

The group used ElevenLabs AI voice tech to make their propaganda videos sound more realistic and to translate their words into multiple languages. The videos specifically target Europeans with messages about corrupt Ukraine politicians and questions about the usefulness of sending military support to Ukraine.

While Recorded Future has acknowledged that these videos would have been made with several voice tools, they only mentioned ElevenLabs. This is probably because, to verify that its tech was used in the propaganda campaign, they uploaded the video clips to ElevenLabs’ own AI voice recognition tool, which “detects whether an audio clip was created using ElevenLabs,” and got a match.

While Recorded Future concluded that public opinion wasn’t really influenced by this campaign, this group has previously been sanctioned by the US government. Earlier this year, in March, the government found that it had created over 60 websites, impersonating genuine news outlets, and ‘’bogus’’ social media accounts, to spread misleading content, an act that the government believes was done on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation.