GoKawiilI asked experts if I'm real. Bad news. Even my aunt wasn't sure if I was a deepfake. AI is so convincing that a sitting prime minister struggled to prove he's alive. You might be next.
I called up my aunt Eleanor a few days ago and asked her to help with an experiment. "It's for an article," I said. I had explained I was going to call her back and she'd either be talking to the real me or an AI deepfake. Could someone who's known me my whole life tell the difference?
At first, my aunt wasn't buying that any AI was involved. "Well, it sounds like you," she said. "I think a real person uses a lot more inflection than I would expect an AI-generated voice to use." That might be true, I told her, but AI is getting pretty advanced. There was a long pause. "I was like 90% sure," she said, hesitating. "But that sounded more artificial."
When we talk about deepfakes, the typical concern is about you getting tricked. Rightly so. AI fakery has been used to scam people out of large sums of money, spread misinformation and even attempt to sway elections. But what if the shoe was on the other foot? What if someone accuses you of being a deepfake? How do you prove you're real?
That's a question Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to ask himself this month. He posted a video where a trick of the light made it look like he might have a glitchy sixth finger on his right hand, once a clear giveaway of AI deepfakes. The internet exploded with rumours that Netanyahu had died in a missile strike and Israel was covering it up. Days later, the prime minister posted a follow up video from a coffee shop, where a smiling Netanyahu held his hands up to demonstrate he had the ordinary number of fingers.