Jordan Peterson deepfake voice generator

Occurred: July 2019

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NotJordanPeterson.com, a website for generating AI audio clips of Jordan Peterson saying whatever users want, was prompted to make offensive and outrageous remarks. The incident resulted in the controversial, anti-woke psychologist threatening legal action and the site being shut down.

Created by computer scientist Chris Vigorito, the site asked users to type fewer than 280 characters of text into a box that would be fed into a neural network trained on Peterson's actual voice. However, journalists and others prompted the site to make Vulgar, offensive, and outrageous remarks, including reading passages from Valerie Solanas, a feminist author who wrote the anti-capitalist, anti-male SCUM Manifesto.

The real Peterson responded by slamming deepfakes and voicing his concern that they 'need to be stopped, using whatever legal means are necessary.' 'In light of Dr. Peterson's response to the technology demonstrated by this site…and out of respect for Dr. Peterson, the functionality of the site will be disabled for the time being,' responded the site creator. 

Operator: Chris Vigorito
Developer: Chris Vigorito
Country: Canada

Sector: Education

Purpose: Damage reputation

Technology: Deepfake - audio; Generative adversarial network (GAN); Neural network; Deep learning; Machine learning
Issue: Privacy; Ethics; Mis/disinformation 

Transparency: Governance; Marketing

Page info
Type: Incident
Published: February 2023
Last updated: October 2023