Journalist Becky Holmes watches her own face deepfaked in real time using just a single photo. Aaron Pritz of Reveal Risk shows how the synthetic video glitches when hands cover the face or the head turns. The segment then generates fake videos of Becky pleading to her mother and marrying comedian Greg Davies, demonstrating how scammers weaponize AI to manipulate people.
I recently explored how deepfake and AI technology are being used to make scams more believable. I reached out to Aaron Pritz at Reveal Risk, who has been studying and leveraging the same deepfake technology that criminals use. My first question was, can this deepfake technology be used in real time? My second question was around how some of the newer generative AI video technology is being used. Here's what I learned and experienced.
You changed your hairstyle slightly since we first met, but this is Amazon Becky's hair.
I didn't realize it was going to be this kind of show.
Hello, family.
Oh my— Oh, other Becky, what have you done to your hair? Other Becky, what?
I don't have the voice changer on, so I'm going to practice in Bangla. Off the mic there. That was bad, a bad British accent and a bad female accent. But yes. So, you know, this is one photo and a simple AI deepfake model, which is basically taking the stitch of your face and embedding it onto my face. And you can see, you know, some of the things like you'll see glitches if I, if I put my hand in front of the face.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Or as I'm turning, To the side, you can see the face start to come unstitched there.
I honestly can't— I don't know how I feel. I can't stop looking at it. It's like I knew that you— I knew you were going to do this, but I didn't expect to sort of feel like I do now, which is just— it's giving me the ick.
Aaron also brought one of his staff in on the experiment whose name is ironically Rebecca, to show what another woman may look like as my deepfake.
I think it's definitely colouring my eyes as well. I see somebody else's face talking with my voice. I think it's retaining a little bit more of my face shape.
Next, they used generative AI video and a single photo of me to create some scenarios of me, which I had no idea what scenarios they had selected, watching these videos brought on a full range of emotions. Mum, please do what they tell you. They are not messing around. Please help me.
That was up there. So, that's me tied to a post, um, asking, uh, sending a video to my mum asking for help. And I'm sitting— there's a still of it now on my screen. It's really weird. You, you, you. Twitter handle is @deathtospinach because I'm horrified by the stuff. So I've just opened a video of me sitting amongst fresh spinach, canned spinach— why anybody would want that, I don't know— and frozen. And the still that I've got it stopped on at the moment is exactly what my face would be like if I was sitting there. Oh God, that's Greg Davies, the love of my life. Do you know, for a minute then, because I, I am, um, for anyone listening, there's a British comedian called Greg Davies who I find hysterical, and I'm completely obsessed with him. I think he's the most perfect human in the world. No one can understand that, but I really do. And this is me getting married to him on a beach. And just for a minute, when I watched that, all my worries disappeared.
One last thing. This voice of me narrating this video, it was 100% AI-generated, and I never said any of these words.
