we featured a young man,
who could turn himself into almost anybody, well in this post there is no body at all! photograph Cyabra/Reuters, it
is almost impossible to tell, but the man featured in the photograph above does
not exist, He is a deepfake, a persona created by a computer algorythim.
However, the articles this “journalist” published in several popular newspapers
are very real, and a sign of things we can expect from a fast-evolving AI, Oliver
Taylor first got the attention of international news agency Reuters after being
alerted about him by London Mazen Masri about an article Taylor had written
about him and his wife, Palestinian rights campaigner Ryvka Barnard, in which
they were described as “known terrorist sympathizers”. The couple were taken
aback by the allegation, especially since it came from a a university student.
But the more Masri looked at Taylor’s profile photo, the more convinced he was
that something was off about him, Mazen Masri contacted Reuters about the mysterious Oliver Taylor, and the
news agency started an investigation which turned up some pretty interesting
results. The University of Birmingham, which he was supposed to be a student of
has no record of him ever attending, his online presence is pretty dubious,
with his only footprint being a Quora account which was only active for two
days in March, and his only available profile photo appears to be an AI-generated
deepfake, “The distortion and inconsistencies in the background are a tell-tale
sign of a synthesized image, as are a few glitches around his neck and collar,”
digital image forensics pioneer Hany Farid told Reuters. Artist Mario Klingemann, who regularly uses
deepfakes in his work, also agreed that Taylor’s photo has “all the hallmarks”
of a deepfake,
photograph Cyabra/Reuters, Reuters’s investigation could not uncover who this Oliver
Taylor really is, and Dan Brahmy, whose tech company Cyabra specializes in
detecting deepfakes confirmed that people trying to find the origin of such
photos are “left searching for a needle in a haystack – except the needle
doesn’t exist”, but just because Oliver Taylor doesn’t seem to exist as a real
person doesn’t mean he can do serious harm as an online persona. He has had
articles published in well-known news outlets like The Jerusalem Post ot Times
of Israel, despite never meeting anyone at these newspapers face to face, editors
at the Jerusalem Post and The Algemeiner told Reuters that they published his
articles after he pitched them stories over email. He didn’t ask for payment
for his work and they didn’t take any steps to vet his identity. “We’re not a
counterintelligence operation,” one editor-in-chief allegedly said, although
Oliver Taylor’s articles didn’t have the highest engagement, they are still
very dangerous because they can spread disinformation from behind a realistic
mask that is becoming increasingly difficult to spot as fake, sadly, Oliver
Taylor is not a one-off, at the beginning of July The Daily Beast exposed an entire
network of deepfake journalists spreading propaganda online. So if you thought
“don’t believe everything you read on the internet” was true before, it’s about
to become even more so!
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