AI At Its Best – Not! UK Leader Targeted With Fake Audio Posted to Twitter

No, this is not a “lets beat up Twitter” post. I assume that the person who posted the fake audio selected Twitter because it would be less likely to be taken down. This is not a smear, just the reality of where the Twitter world is today.

UK opposition leader Keir Starmer was smeared by a fake audio clip of him verbally abusing his staff. It was posted to Twitter on Sunday.

The post came from a pseudonymous account on the opening day of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool.

Whether the clip is real or not is really irrelevant. The clip has been viewed 1.4 million times. In the world of social media, perception is reality. Now Starmer is going to have to focus on rebutting this, rather than whatever else his message might be.

The POSTER claimed that the audio was genuine and that its authenticity had been corroborated by a sound engineer.

The post is still available on Twitter tonight and has been reposted 2,675 times. On the other hand, it only has 4,606 likes. Given the hundreds of million Twitter users, this indicates that the post in not gaining a lot of traction.

Reality Defender, whose business it is to detect deep fakes, says it is likely to be manipulated, but the proof is not definitive – meaning maybe it is fake and maybe not. There does not seem to be any warning associated with the post on Twitter.

Given that the U.S. is entering its election season (Starmer is running for U.K. Prime Minister), one should expect a lot more of this over the next year. Some of it will obviously be fake, like the pictures we saw of Trump in prison when he was booked (that never happened). Others will be much better.

To quote Mission Impossible: Your mission, Mr./Ms. average citizen, whether you chose to accept it or not, will be, over the next several years, to figure out whether any particular media item – audio, video, photo, print – is real or not. This is going to be hard. Sorry, I don’t have an easy answer for you.

If you need help in this area, please contact us.

Credit: The Record

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