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I’m Watching Myself On Youtube Saying Things I Would Never Say. This Is The Deepfake Menace We Must Confront | Yanis Varoufakis

These inventions trigger rage, but also optimism. Maybe they will make people think more critically about debate and democracy

It was my blue shirt, a present from my sister-in-law, that gave it all away. It made me think of Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, the lowly bureaucrat in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella The Double, a disconcerting study of the fragmented self within a vast, impersonal feudal system.

It all started with a message from an esteemed colleague congratulating me on a video talk on some geopolitical theme. When I clicked on the attached YouTube link to recall what I had said, I began to worry that my memory is not what it used to be. When did I record said video? A couple of minutes in, I knew there was something wrong. Not because I found fault in what I was saying, but because I realised that the video showed me sitting at my Athens office desk wearing that blue shirt, which had never left my island home. It was, as it turned out, a video featuring some deepfake AI doppelganger of me.

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I’m Watching Myself On Youtube Saying Things I Would Never Say. This Is The Deepfake Menace We Must Confront | Yanis Varoufakis

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