Deepfakeable Me
My AI Deepfake Doppelganger
We live in an age of miracles and wonders, and some of those miracles and wonders are guaranteed to slam you deep, deep into the uncanny valley.
In the last few days, your YouTube feed might have mentioned a channel called “Liberal America,” which has been slamming out videos of…well, me.
Every few hours, another video pops up of me taking on the current issues of the day, very much using my voice, my image, although with smoother skin and perfect teeth. (Yes, Mom, I should have worn my retainer.)
It’s…creepy.
The technology has allowed some rando to use voice replicating tech like ElevenLabs to copy my sound and style. It’s taken AI video generation tools like Sora to create a lifelike enough version of me that has already fooled over a million people. They then use ChatGPT to generate answers to prompts that sound like my words.
I suppose I’ve made it easy: thousands of television, radio, print, and podcast interviews. Hundreds of my own podcasts. Thousands of articles. As they say in AI, I’ve produced a “rich corpus of training materials.”
We’ve asked Google to take the site down via its automated tools. You can imagine how well that’s going…which is to say, not at all.
I post genuine, all-me, no-AI commentary videos only in four places: Lincoln Square’s YouTube, the Lincoln Project, my Against All Enemies YouTube Page, and here on my Substack.
Accept no substitutes.
I’m a guest on other folks’ platforms all the time, so after that, you take your chances.
It’s a weird, brave new world, and I hope we can get these fakes taken down, but until then, I appreciate you all very much.
I ran across this fake yesterday and immediately realized it was fake. I filed a complaint with Youtube/google on the spot. Not that I expect them to do anything except send me a do-nothing email (thank you but this doesn't violate any of our rules). buncha idiots.
The bots (A.I. voices) always make very obvious mistakes. e.g., pronouncing the year 1997 as "one thousand nine nine seven" or St. Petersburg as "Street Petersburg". They're not foolproof - yet. I think we all should stick to known, legitimate channels, like Rick advised. God help us.