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Imagine a top entrepreneur offering you an olive branch and telling you in person that there is now a risk-free way to get rich quickly.You can earn $1 million just by filling out a form,what will you do?

If this person is Musk, and the BBC endorses him, telling you this is "A technological revolution unknown to the public"Woolen cloth?

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▲AI Musk deep fake video

People who are more vigilant may immediately smell the scent of telecommunications fraud, but for people who do not often access the Internet, it is not easy to identify such fake videos.

According to the New York Times, at the end of last year, 82-year-old retiree Beauchamp saw Musk promote a radical investment opportunity and promised risk-free and quick returns. He contacted the company in the video and spent all his retirement money in a series of transactions in the following weeks.Cumulative "investment" exceeds US$690,000。

As you can imagine, the pension disappeared along with the company.

With the nameDeepfakeAs AI technology becomes more mature, similar videos are flooding the Internet. According to estimates by the well-known consulting firm Deloitte, deep fake videosTens of billions of dollars in fraud losses each year。

Sensity, an organization that monitors deep fake videos, recently conducted a survey and analyzedMore than 2000 sectionsDeep fake video, foundMuskhas become the most common "spokesperson" in this type of video. Since the end of last year,Musk appears in nearly a quarter of deepfake scam videos, among which his appearance rate in videos about cryptocurrency reached90%。

Other common forgeries include famous investors.Buffett, founder of AmazonBezoswait.

1. Musk’s appearance rate is high, with tens of billions of dollars in fraud every year1/4

In order to create these videos, the scammers first find real interview videos of Musk and others. For example, the footage in the opening video was originally from an interview Musk gave to the Wall Street Journal, discussing how to use AI and other technologies to achieve efficient management of the company.

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▲Original Musk interview video

Scammers take advantage ofLip-synching, adjust the character's mouth shape, and then useVoice cloning toolAdded an AI-copied voice.

▲Lip sync (Source: The New York Times)

Finally, some videos will add fake icons that imitate professional news organizations such as the BBC, which may be more convincing to ordinary Internet users.

▲News logo (Source: The New York Times)

It is difficult to quantify exactly how many deep fake videos are circulating online. Searching for common promotional copy for these scams in Facebook's ad library will bring up hundreds of thousands of ads, many of which are deep fake videos.

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▲AI Bezos deep fake video

YouTube is also full of these videos. If you search for "Elon Bitcoin conference" on YouTube, you will get dozens of videos marked as live, but in fact they are pre-recorded deepfakes.

▲YouTube deep fake video (Source: YouTube)

The number of viewers of these "live broadcasts" is oftenHundreds of thousandsHowever, YouTube has confirmed that scammers can use "water armies" to increase the number of users and artificially inflate this number.

In May this year, the well-known consulting firm Deloitte released a report on how generative AI increases the risk of deep fake fraud, which mentioned that by 2023, deep fake incidents in the financial technology field willIncreased by 700%, and predicts that by 2027, AI will cause fraud losses in the United StatesFrom $12.3 billion to $40 billion in 2023，The compound annual growth rate is 32%。

▲Forecast of growth in fraud losses caused by generative AI (Source: Deloitte)

The number and influence of deep fake videos are growing. According to a survey by Sensity, an organization that monitors deep fake videos, among more than 2,000 deep fake videos,Musk has become the most common "spokesperson", appears inNearly 1/4 of deep fake scam videosAmong them, his appearance rate in videos about cryptocurrency is as high as90%。

Sensity co-founder Francesco Cavalli believes thatThis might be the biggest deepfake scam ever。

2. Cost not exceeding10Dollars, a few minutes to fake a large number of videos

In fact, the cost of producing such videos is not high.It only costs less than $10, you canIn a few minutesA large number of fake videos were produced.

These AI-generated videos aren't perfect. Musk sounds robotic in some of them, and his lip movements aren't always consistent. But they can fool a fair number of people, and the technology is improving all the time.

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▲AI Musk deep fake video

Sensity's investigation shows that these scammers mainly come from Asia and Eastern European countries, using free and cheap tools to translate videos into multiple languages, continuously spreading the scam to a wider range.

One common trick isPromoting fake AI softwareThe scammers encourage their targets to first hand over a small sum of money — usually around $250 — by having a “spokesperson” claim that the software can generate an astonishing return on investment, then slowly lure them into investing more by claiming that the value of the initial investment is increasing.

For example, in the following video from Tesla’s shareholder meeting, Musk “demonstrated” an AI-driven automated trading product.Can double a specific investment every day"With an investment of only 4,500 rand, you can get a stable profit of 8,000 rand per day." (Note: Rand is the currency unit of South Africa)

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▲AI Musk deep fake video

These AI scammers usually targetOlder Internet usersThey may be familiar with topics such as cryptocurrency and AI, as well as people like Musk and Buffett, but they are not familiar with safe investment methods.

“Seniors are a very wealthy and gullible group,” said Finn Brunton, a professor of technology studies at the University of California, Davis and an expert on the cryptocurrency market. “Even without social media platforms, seniors have always been a target of scams.”

Musk is targeted because he has a unique global fan base. Experts who study the cryptocurrency community say these people are usually composed of conservatives, anti-establishment people and cryptocurrency enthusiasts who are often attracted by novel ways to make money - making them the perfect target for scams.

Molly White, a cryptocurrency community researcher, said this group of people always believe that the secret of wealth is hidden from them, and once they "discover" this secret, they will think that this is all they need.

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▲AI Musk deep fake video

Beauchamp, the retiree mentioned at the beginning, was a sales representative for a Canadian company before he was 75. He just started using Facebook last year and then saw an ad for Musk being interviewed on CNN.

Although he insisted that he had also watched the video on CNN, a CNN spokesperson said:Musk hasn't been interviewed by them for many years.。

According to emails between Mr. Beauchamp and the company mentioned in the video, he wired $27,216 to the company, Magna-FX, in December last year.

Magna-FX made it appear that his investments were growing in value, even having a sales agent use software to remotely control Beauchamp's computer and pretend to transfer funds for investment.

To withdraw the appreciated funds, Beauchamp was told to pay $3,500 in management fees and $3,500 in commissions. After he wired the money, he was told he needed to pay another $20,000 to withdraw about $200,000 of it. He paid that again.

Eventually, Beauchamp exhausted his retirement savings, maxed out his credit cards, drew down his line of credit and borrowed money from his sister to invest and pay fees. But the scammers kept asking him to pay more. That’s when Beauchamp contacted police.

Unfortunately, no progress has been made in this case.

3. Platform supervision faces challenges, and deleting videos is only a temporary solution.

The prevalence of false advertising is closely related to the platform’s negligence in supervision.

Some people who have been faked by videos have taken legal action. Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest filed a civil lawsuit against Facebook's parent company Meta, accusing it of negligence in its advertising business operations. His deep fake videos were used in Facebook ads, and he believed that this would lure "innocent users into bad investments."

Meta responded by saying it was training automated detection systems to catch fraud on its platform, but also called it a game of “cat and mouse” with scammers constantly changing their tactics to evade detection.

YouTube is also taking some steps to combat deepfake videos. In March, YouTube updated its policies to require creators to disclose whether they used AI to create their content and to prohibit fraudulent and doctored videos.

YouTube mentioned in a statement that from January to March this year, the company deleted more than 15.7 million channels and more than 8.2 million videos that violated content policies. However, simply deleting videos is still an indicator that does not address the root cause. The platform needs to re-examine its review system and solve the problem from the root.

Conclusion: Deep fake videos pollute the internet

Digital fraud is as old as the internet. But as AI technology matures and the cost of using AI tools gets lower, the time and money costs of using the technology to commit fraud have also been greatly reduced. A new wave of deepfake videos featuring celebrities such as Musk is polluting the internet.

As technology continues to develop, deep fakes may become more difficult to distinguish, which will put new demands on platforms, regulators, and laws.

source:The New York Times