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Comment by aidanhs | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I struggled with this overall.

For context: I'm mostly unaware of actions of US presidents (beyond the broad sweeps based on left vs right) and I've at most listened to Trump and Biden maybe a couple of times for a total of ~1min in the last few years - just doing this exercise has probably at least doubled my exposure.

I found the text and voice mostly impossible unless the content clued me in. Video was a little easier because I know to look for teeth, video with sound was fairly easy.

Is there a generic trick for recognising faked voices without really knowing the original (similar to looking for teeth on videos)?

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Same here! I'm not a native English speaker, I live in the US but don't follow politics. I got a lot of Biden ones wrong because I haven't watched as many videos of him as Trump's videos. I also marked some real videos as fakes because I thought there is no way Biden or Trump would talk about this specific subject in this way.

Maybe we are missing some tricks to pick out the fakes.

For the majority of folks here who picked out the fakes easily, do you feel if you can do the same if the videos were of Putin speaking in Russian (with subtitles), or speaking in English with a very thick accent?

There are real world effects in the real videos that are completely absent in the fake ones that give them away.

The fakes have completely clean audio with similar artificial noise (real ones have crowd, or other backround noise), the fakes have no microphone or environmental artifacts (echo/reverb, plosives, others).

What made them even easier to recognize is that accents were all wrong. They were exactly as another person said, caricatures of the original voices. I actually found that they were so obvious that most could be identified before the second or two that they make you wait to click the submit button.

If it were a foreign language, I think the success rate would be lower, but the unnatural lack of noise gives them away.

For the speech clips I thought the disjointedness of the words made it obvious. That being said, Trump has a very recognizable way of talking so his clips were really easy to sort.

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