You can’t shake it off – deepfakes are here

THE saying “seeing is believing” was coined in the 17th century, but is an anachronistic oddity in the 21st one as we gingerly pick our way around deepfake images of Taylor Swift and the Pope. Now, artificial intelligence (AI)-generated mimicry is coming for the everyman too.

Last month, a high school athletic director in the US was arrested for framing his principal as a racist, by using AI to simulate the latter’s voice saying antisemitic things in a recording. Police eventually found that the accused had done it as payback for a poor work evaluation.

The deepfake recording, which went viral, showcased the exponential improvement of the technology. It had a deliberately tinny quality and additional background noise to recreate the illusion of having been surreptitiously recorded. The principal’s deepfaked voice also had the cadences and effects you’d expect in natural human speech.