Hany Farid Tells BBC Writer That It Is Increasingly Difficult To Prove Identity

I tried to prove I’m not AI. My aunt wasn’t convinced

By Thomas Germain

I asked experts if I’m real. Bad news. Even my aunt wasn’t sure if I was a deepfake. AI is so convincing that a sitting prime minister struggled to prove he’s alive. You might be next.

I called up my aunt Eleanor a few days ago and asked her to help with an experiment. “It’s for an article,” I said. I had explained I was going to call her back and she’d either be talking to the real me or an AI deepfake. Could someone who's known me my whole life tell the difference?

At first, my aunt wasn’t buying that any AI was involved. “Well, it sounds like you,” she said. “I think a real person uses a lot more inflection than I would expect an AI-generated voice to use.” That might be true, I told her, but AI is getting pretty advanced. There was a long pause. “I was like 90% sure,” she said, hesitating. “But that sounded more artificial...”

Netanyahu’s follow-up coffee shop video is real too, says Hany Farid, a digital forensics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and co-founder of GetReal Security, which works to mitigate the threat of AI deepfakes. His team ran voice analysis, frame-by-frame face detection, careful inspection of light and shadows and more. “There’s no evidence that this is AI-generated,” Farid says...

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