Image created using DALL·E 3 with this prompt: Create an image of a diverse group of senior executives. Behind them are windows that show a scenic city landscape from a high-rise office building. These executives are all looking at a video screen in a conference room. Fully hidden behind the screen is a robot creating a human likeness to scam everyone else in the room into thinking he’s a fellow employee, when in reality, he’s using deepfake technology to steal money from the company. Aspect ratio: 16×9.
In a first-of-this-scale AI heist, a scammer using deepfake technology walked away with more than $25 million from a Hong Kong firm. According to the South China Morning Post, the scam involved the use of AI tools to create highly convincing fake videos and audio recordings, which were used to impersonate the company’s chief financial officer and other employees during a video conference call. The scammers instructed an employee to transfer funds, which amounted to HK$200 million (US$25.6 million). Despite initial doubts, the employee was convinced by the presence of the CFO and others in the group video call and proceeded to make the transfer. The Hong Kong police are investigating; so far, no arrests have been made.
Deepfakes are not new, nor are they newly relevant. They are democratized tech that is becoming more accessible and easier to use every day. We are less than a year from what I’ve named “social production.” Whatever you think social media did to media, that’s what social production is going to do to production. Anyone with an idea will be able to describe it and see it realized by AI. Importantly, this may not be just a single LLM or other AI model. It will most likely be a stack of specialized AI models working in tandem as an autonomous agent. However it manifests over the next year or so, the outcome is clear: super-realistic deepfakes are here, and – in short order – will be indistinguishable from the subjects they depict.
As I have previously admonished, we must now default to distrust.
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.