Berkeley professor tries to prove that Musk has a humiliating burner account

Elon Musk’s latest drama already had all the ingredients of a classic internet episode: bizarre claims, a memecoin and a very confused comment from Musk’s own mother. Now a UC Berkeley professor has jumped into the fray.

The brouhaha has a simple source. Quite a few people now believe that Tesla’s CEO runs an influential burner account under the name Adrian Dittmann. The account boasts over 200,000 X followers and hosts live stream audio rooms on the platform. Dittmann doesn’t have a real picture on their profile and regularly posts about Musk’s favorite talking points, such as The success of SpaceX and criticism of older media.

More importantly, the account’s voice sounds almost exactly like Musk’s. Accent, intonations, buzzwords, everything. It’s creepy. In a highly circulated sound clipsDittmann seems to be using the first person while referring to Musk, though it lacks context.

If Dittmann really is Musk, the world’s richest man is on one of the creepiest runs imaginable. In response to a January 2024 post from Musk with his child X, Dittmann wrote“You are a great father, Elon. Your children are very lucky to have you.”

Musk laughed at the idea that he is Dittmann in one postand he and Dittmann’s votes overlapped in early 2024 Space currentwhich apparently indicates that they came from two different sources. Maye Musk, the billionaire’s mother, was also there; she said Dittmann sounded like Musk speaking through a megaphone, and later misidentified the voice of Dittmann as her son’s. In response, Dittmann said that they are German and that they learned English by listening to the BBC World Service and then playing video games with Americans.

Enter UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid. The researcher, jointly appointed in the school’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the School of Information, works with digital forensics and human perception. On New Year’s Day, he posted one analysis of Musk and Dittmann’s voices to his thousands of LinkedIn followers, declaring that it was “unlikely” that Musk and Dittmann were two different people.

Farid told SFGATE that he thought the mystery of Musk and Dittmann “was an interesting forensic question.”

Farid had already developed his biometric voice identification method, he said, so all he had to do was collect Musk’s and Dittmann’s voice samples and then compare them.

The researcher wrote that according to his estimates, only 0.5% of all votes from different people would be measured as equally as Musk’s and Dittmann’s were in his analysis. This does not mean that there is a 99.5% chance that they are the same; this means that it is extremely rare to get voices so close together in a group of people. Farid wrote: “These two voices are unusually similar, and although it is unlikely that they are different people, it is not impossible.”

In a message to SFGATE, he doubled down, saying the voices appeared to belong to the same person. He added that he analyzed the Dittmann voice samples to see if they were generated by artificial intelligence, and it appeared they were not. He did not rule out the use of a voice modulator.

Farid also pointed out the glaring fact that Dittmann has not visually proven its independent existence.

“I may have missed it, but I haven’t seen any video of the Dittmann persona, which would obviously help clarify who (or what) is behind this voice,” Farid wrote.

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