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Faking it: How AI could be used to fool us all

Could deepfakes – which artificial intelligence can create quickly and cheaply – cause untold damage? Alex Meehan investigates

The key difference between 1924 and 2023 is that today, AI can be used to make fake news quickly and cheaply. Picture: Getty

Imagine the chaos that would follow if the Twitter account of a major political figure like US president Biden was hacked, and a video posted in which he appeared to announce a nuclear first strike on Russia.

All around the world, people would wonder, ‘Is this real?’ Tech-savvy observers would caution that it could be a ‘deep fake,’ a facsimile created using artificial intelligence (AI), but in the time it took for the facts to ...