UNESCO Room 9
7, Place Fontenoy
75007 – Paris
11h00 – 12h30
Voice and AI: from usurpation to substitution?
As we enter a society of verisimilitude, synthetic voices and neural models make the fake almost indistinguishable from the real. Driven by new digital uses, mobility, the explosion of podcasts and the rise of text-to-speech, audio is experiencing unprecedented growth and becoming a global information vector, sometimes essential in countries with poor access to the written word.
But this revolution is accompanied by major risks of usurpation, whether personal, economic or political. The ability to reproduce a voice to perfection opens the way to manipulation, fraud and new forms of psychological influence, as specialists in the human, cognitive and digital sciences point out. Similarly, artificial intelligence is having an impact on a number of business sectors where the human voice seems threatened by a gradual trend towards substitution, notably in the cultural and creative industries ecosystem.
Faced with these crucial challenges, it is becoming essential to establish an ethical and regulatory framework. Several international institutions have already begun this process, but collective vigilance remains essential to ensure that technological progress remains at the service of human beings.
The resolution “Artificial intelligence and voice identity theft”, supported by UNESCO’s Sound Week with several international delegations, is part of this process, establishing an inventory, a technical and legal analysis, followed by concrete proposals based on expert debate.
With this in mind, three debates will be organized in 2026: the first on the general state of play, the second on legal solutions, and the third on technological solutions.
Debate with :
– Catherine Morin-Desailly, Senator for Seine-Maritime
– Nicolas Curien, member of the Comité consultatif national d’éthique du numérique
– Laurence Devillers, professor of AI at Sorbonne University, CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire interdisciplinaire des sciences du numérique (LISN) on human-machine affective interactions.
– Jérôme Doncieux, founder and CEO of Majelan X
Moderator: Christophe Rioux, academic, journalist, writer and administrator of UNESCO Sound Week
There are no more seats in the hall, but you can participate online via zoom by registering here :
