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AI text-to-speech programs could “unlearn” how to imitate certain people

Peter Hall

created: July 15, 2025, 10 a.m. | updated: July 17, 2025, 12:20 p.m.

Machine unlearning instead asks whether an AI can be made to forget a piece of information that the company doesn’t want it to know. While machine unlearning has ties to older techniques in AI research, it’s only in the past couple of years that it’s been applied to large language models. The generated text-to-speech audio from the original model using the above as a prompt. In machine unlearning, pieces of data are often replaced with randomness so that they can’t be reverse-engineered back to the original. “This is one of the first works I’ve seen for speech.” Patil is organizing a machine unlearning workshop affiliated with the conference, and the voice unlearning research will also be presented there.

5 months ago: MIT Technology Review