Watching myself say things on YouTube that I would never say. This is the deepfake threat we must face | Yanis Varoufakis

IIt was my blue shirt, a gift from my sister-in-law, that gave it all away. It reminded me of Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, the humble bureaucrat in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella The Double, a disturbing study of the fragmented self within a vast, impersonal feudal system.

It all started with a message from a valued colleague who congratulated me on a video lecture on a geopolitical topic. As I clicked on the attached YouTube link to remember what I said, I began to worry that my memory wasn’t what it once was. When did I record the video? After a few minutes I knew something was wrong. Not because I had anything wrong with what I said, but because I realized that the video showed me sitting at my desk in Athens, wearing the blue shirt that had never left my island home. It turned out to be a video featuring a deepfake AI lookalike of me.

Since then, hundreds of such videos showing my face and synthesizing my voice have spread on YouTube…