I'm watching myself on YouTube saying things I would never say. This is the deepfake menace we must confront | Yanis Varoufakis

"When I clicked on the attached YouTube link to recall what I had said, I began to worry that my memory is not what it used to be. When did I record said video? A couple of minutes in, I knew there was something wrong. Not because I found fault in what I was saying, but because I realised that the video showed me sitting at my Athens office desk wearing that blue shirt, which had never left my island home."

"It was, as it turned out, a video featuring some deepfake AI doppelganger of me. Since then, hundreds of such videos, bearing my face and synthesising my voice, have proliferated across YouTube and social media. Even this weekend, there has been another crop, depicting a deepfaked me saying fictitious things about the coup in Venezuela. They lecture, they say things I might have said, sometimes intermingled with things I would never say."

"They rage, they pontificate. Some are crude, others unsettlingly persuasive. Supporters send them to me, asking: Yanis, did you really say that? Opponents circulate them as proof of my idiocy. Far worse, some argue that my doppelgangers are more articulate and cogent than me. And so I find myself in the bizarre position of being a spectator to my own digital puppetry, a phantom in a technofeudal machine I have long argued is not merely broken, but engineered to disempower."

A politician's likeness and voice have been cloned into numerous deepfake videos that circulate widely on YouTube and social media. The deepfakes show him in familiar clothing and settings, sometimes saying plausible statements and other times making false or extreme claims. Supporters and opponents use these videos to praise, question, or discredit him. Platform takedown requests remove some content temporarily, but channels and videos reappear under new guises. The proliferation of convincing impostors leaves the individual feeling like a spectator to his own digital puppetry, exposed to persuasive misrepresentations within a technofeudal system that disempowers.

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