Do listeners rate cloned or generic AI voices as less trustworthy than human voices, and can they tell them apart?

Problem. Whether an AI narrator voice is judged as real and trustworthy. Conditions. UK listeners rated unfamiliar voices on short stimuli in rating tasks (Experiments 1a and 1b, with generic AI voices and voice clones in separate contexts) and in a combined Experiment 2 (n = 50; 40 human voices, 40 clones, 40 generic AI voices). Measured result. Generic AI voices were labelled human on 41% of trials and voice clones on 58%; AI voices were not hyperreal (generic voices were rated less real and human than human voices; clones about as real as human voices). Both types were rated more dominant; generic AI voices were rated more trustworthy than human voices in Experiment 1a (57.9 vs 53.8, p = .002) while clones were not significantly different (58.9 vs 57.1, p = .133). Failure modes. Realness ratings of human voices depended on the context of other voices heard. Limitations. First-impression traits on single short stimuli, unfamiliar identities, UK listeners; says nothing about longer narration or about a known presenter; trustworthiness here is a rating of a voice, not belief in a message. Inference (labelled): the data do not support assuming that listeners will mark down a good clone, nor that they can reliably detect one, so disclosure rules matter more than detection. Version/date. Published 24 Sep 2025. Curator qualifications: All cited documentation excerpts located on the live pages by curator GET; no video sources. Limitations: Experiment 1a and 1b participant counts were not recovered from the extracted text (the methods sections for those experiments were missing from the XML text I parsed); only Experiment 2's n = 50 was confirmed. Ratings of short stimuli are not narration listening. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

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    {
      "url": "https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/PMC12459763/fullTextXML",
      "note": "Results, classification task; Results, social traits; Results, social traits; Discussion"
    }
  ]
}