A video doing the rounds on Chinese social media these days has gone viral for showing how easy it is to use AI-powered deepfake technology to transform into virtually anyone online.

App filters and deepfake technology have been around for years now, but the advent of artificial intelligence has elevated them to a whole new level, one which makes it almost impossible to tell what is real on the internet. Take this recent video shared by a Chinese engineer where he demonstrates how easy it is for him to pass as an attractive young girl. All he has to do is put on a wig, enable a piece of software and the AI takes care of the rest. It is able to replace the man’s face with that of an attractive girl but otherwise mimics all of his actions, including eating with chopsticks, pinching his own face, and speaking with the appropriate mouth movement.

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A Hong Kong finance worker at a multinational company was tricked into transferring $25 million to scammers after attending a video conference with deepfake CFO and several colleagues.

Hong Kong police recently reported that it is investigating an elaborate scam that saw a group of bad actors defraud a multinational firm of $200 million Hong Kong dollars ($25.6 million) using deepfake technology to impersonate company management during a video call. Fraudsters initially targeted one of the unnamed company’s finance workers with an email from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer (CFO). Seeing that the message involved a ‘secret transaction’ to the tune of $200 million Hong Kong dollars, the man suspected it was a phishing email, but those doubts were put to rest when he was invited to a video conference with the CFO and several other colleagues he recognized.

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A bank manager in the U.A.E. was conned into authorizing a $35 million transfer after receiving vocal confirmation from the account holder. Only that wasn’t who the manager thought they were…

Early last year, the manager of an undisclosed bank in the United Arab Emirates received a call from a longtime client – the director of a company with whom he had spoken before. The man was excited that his company was about to make an important acquisition, so he needed the bank to authorize a transfer of $35 million as soon as possible. The client added that a lawyer named Martin Zelner had been contracted to handle the acquisition, and the manager could see emails from the lawyer in his inbox. He had spoken to the client before, he recognized his voice, and everything he said checked out. So he proceeded to make the most expensive mistake of his career…

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An attractive female Twitter user in Japan recently shocked her tens of thousands of fans after going on a national television show to unmask herself as a 50-year-old man using a popular smartphone app to alter her appearance. I think it’s safe to say that after reading this story, you’ll never trust another internet photo again. Nor should you!

Azusa Gakuyuki, a young, attractive girl who had been entertaining her Twitter followers with photos of herself indulging in her biggest passions (motorcycle riding, mountain hiking, skiing and other outdoorsy activities) went on popular television program Monday Late Show (から夜ふかし) to reveal something that left everyone flabbergasted. The beautiful girl, who appeared to be in her early 20s, was actually a 50-year-old man using the popular app FaceApp to alter his appearance and pass himself off as a woman.

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In an age when AI-controlled digital news anchors exist, and digitally-rendered Instagram influencers have millions of adoring fans, it’s really no surprise that people are turning to so-called deepfake technology to enhance their looks and reach online stardom.

Asian social media has been buzzing about this young South Korean youtuber who goes by the moniker ‘RuiCovery’ ever since she outed herself as a “virtual human”. Apparently, that means that everything about her is real, except the face. Her hair, her body, her voice are all real, but the face is digitally rendered using deepfake technology. The revelation was shocking, especially to her fans, none of which had ever noticed anything out of the ordinary about the female YouTuber. The news once again brought deepfake into the spotlight and ignited a debate about the need to regulate it in order to prevent its use with malicious intent.

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It’s almost impossible to tell, but the man featured in the photos below doesn’t 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…

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Zao, a Chinese artificial intelligence-powered app that allows users to swap faces with actors and other celebrities in videos and GIF images, has sparked serious privacy concerns due to how convincing the transformation can be.

Uploaded to China’s iOS App Store last Friday, Zao became the number one downloaded app on the platform in only two days and looking at what it can do, it’s easy to see why. By using artificial intelligence, the app is able to take a simple picture of the user and superimpose it on to the face of any character in a video or GIF with truly breathtaking results. For example, one user claims it only took them under 8 seconds to swap faces with Leonardo DiCaprio and fulfil their dream of starring in blockbusters like Titanic.

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