Several MEPs have been tricked with a deepfake . The parliamentarians believed they were participating in a video call with the Russian opponent Leonid Volkov, an ally of Alekséi Navalni . However, on the other side of the screen there was an impostor posing as the politician thanks to this technology that allows, through artificial intelligence, to create highly realistic fake videos.
Among the parliamentarians deceived by the deepfake are, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Latvian parliament, Rihards Kol ; the chairman of the UK Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Tugendhat , and deputies from Estonia and Lithuania , according to The Guardian. While the incident does not appear to have interfered with diplomatic relations, it highlights the dangers that artificial intelligence can cause in the hands of imposters.
“Putin's Kremlin is so weak and scared by the force of @navalny that they are holding fake meetings to discredit the Navalni team,” Tugendhat wrote on Twitter, referring to attempts to make them look bad. Kols, for his part, uploaded a real photo of Volkov next to a screenshot of the video call with the deepfake. Incredibly, the fake image looks very similar to the real one .
An ultra-realistic deepfake impersonates the identity of a Russian politician
Credit: Facebook Leonid Volkov Volkov was surprised by the realism of the deepfake of which he was a victim. “Quite an impressive campaign! But what is more impressive: 'my' face in the conference call with the presidents of the Baltic. It looks like my real face , but how did they manage to put it on Zoom's call? Welcome to the age of deep fakes… “he wrote.
He also targeted the Russians nicknamed Vovan and Lexus, which are often related to jokes with Western officials. Alexei Stolyarov (Lexus), denied having used a deepfake to look like Volkov and assured that the Russian opponent “probably has false information”.
Kols explains that on March 16 he received an email with an invitation from someone pretending to be a representative of Leonid Volkov. In the text, a meeting was requested with the Foreign Affairs Committee to talk about “the situation of the case of the Russian opponent Alekséi Navalni and other issues. The deepfake video call was finally On March 23, although previously other deputies had already fallen for the deception.
While there are some tools to detect a deepfake, it is not always an easy task. The low quality of video calls added to the increasingly better technology to create fake videos become the perfect combo for the proliferation of this type of deception.
