#deepfakes

#deepfakes

Beauty and fashion influencer Eni Popoola first learned she'd been deepfaked the way many creators do: from her audience. A YouTube ad sent by a follower featured her face and her voice, promoting an online course she had never heard of. "People were sending screenshots saying, 'Hey, there's this video of you, and we obviously know it's not you, because this is not something that you would talk about,'" Popoola said. She's far from alone, as the experience of finding one's AI doppelganger - promoting unknown supplements, self-help content or beauty products - is becoming increasingly commonplace in the creator economy.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

In a new viral AI video, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise pummel each other on a rooftop in a cinematic action sequence. It's not a trailer for a new blockbuster, and it's not actually Pitt and Cruise, though it looks a lot like them. The video is so realistic, in fact, that the clearest sign it's made with AI is the dialogue.

Romance scams used to feel like a cliché. Everyone pictured an email from an overseas "prince" that was poorly written and full of typos and pleas for cash. Now, that cliché is dead. Today's romance scams are industrial-scale operations. Attackers use artificial intelligence to clone voices, create deepfake video calls, and write scripts with large language models (LLMs). In 2024 alone, the Federal Trade Commission reported that financial losses to romance scams skyrocketed, with victims losing $1.14 billion.

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as UNC1069 has been observed targeting the cryptocurrency sector to steal sensitive data from Windows and macOS systems with the ultimate goal of facilitating financial theft. "The intrusion relied on a social engineering scheme involving a compromised Telegram account, a fake Zoom meeting, a ClickFix infection vector, and reported usage of AI-generated video to deceive the victim," Google Mandiant researchers Ross Inman and Adrian Hernandez said.

Grok's placement on the government website realfood.gov follows uproar over the chatbot's creation of millions of sexualized deepfakes of women and children in late December and its spouting of racist and antisemitic content last summer. Other government agencies are also using the chatbot made by xAI, Musk's AI company, but the prominent placement of Grok on realfood.gov over the weekend appears to be one of the first instances of the federal government pointing online visitors to Musk's chatbot.

There are people on the Internet who want to know all about you! Unfortunately, they don't have the best of intentions, but Google has some handy tools to address that, and they've gotten an upgrade today. The "Results About You" tool can now detect and remove more of your personal information. Plus, the tool for removing non-consensual explicit imagery (NCEI) is faster to use. All you have to do is tell Google your personal details first-that seems safe, right?

"Sarita" on Instagram appears to be the account the agency reported, showing a blonde woman wearing a Massachusetts State Police uniform, complete with a badge and a gun. In the pictures posted since Dec. 29, her name tags reads "Sara," "St. Pay," and "St. May." In one, the letters are unintelligible. The account has more than 100,000 followers as of Sunday evening. MSP declined to confirm the account.

The aim is to curb the rapid spread of manipulated images and videos used for abuse, harassment, and criminal exploitation. The initiative will be led by the Home Office and developed in collaboration with major technology companies, academic researchers, and technical experts. Ministers say the framework will explore how emerging technologies can better recognise and assess deepfakes, while also setting clear expectations for how companies detect and respond to them.

The French investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors' cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors' office said in a statement. It's looking into alleged "complicity" in possessing and spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.

X and Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI also face intensifying scrutiny from Britain's data privacy regulator, which opened formal investigations into how they handled personal data when they developed and deployed Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.Grok, which was built by xAI and is available through X, sparked global outrage last month after it pumped out a torrent of sexualized nonconsensual deepfake images in response to requests from X users.

PARIS French prosecutors raided the offices of social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into allegations including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes. They have also summoned billionaire owner Elon Musk for questioning. X and Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI also face intensifying scrutiny from Britain's data privacy regulator, which opened formal investigations into how they handled personal data when they developed and deployed Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.

"Did your favorite sports star 'shock fans' or 'shake' the league by 'publicly' or 'flatly' refusing to wear an LGBT Rainbow Armband because it would turn the game 'into a political circus?'"

Belfast City Council looks set to suspend its use of social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, following recent concerns over its AI tool Grok. The council's strategic and resources committee on Friday decided it should "suspend posting on its account and signpost followers towards the council's other social media channels". The decision is subject to ratification at the next full council meeting on 2 February.

Ring has launched a new tool that can tell you if a video clip captured by its camera has been altered or not. The company says that every video downloaded from Ring starting in December 2025 going forward will come with a digital security seal. "Think of it like the tamper-evident seal on a medicine bottle," it explained. Its new tool, called Ring Verify, can tell you if a video has been altered in any way.

YouTube is just as wary of the rise of AI slop as you, and that's why more AI-generated content is coming to the platform in the near future. In a lengthy outlining YouTube's 2026 plans, CEO Neal Mohan said the company will continue to embrace this new "creative frontier" by soon allowing its creators to throw together Shorts using their AI-generated likeness.