Michel Janse was on her honeymoon when she found out she had been cloned.
The 27-year-old content creator was with her husband in a rented cabin in snowy Maine when messages from her followers began trickling in, warning that a YouTube commercial was using her likeness to promote erectile dysfunction supplements.
The commercial showed Janse — a Christian social media influencer who posts about travel, home decor and wedding planning — in her real bedroom, wearing her real clothes but describing a nonexistent partner with sexual health problems.
“Michael spent years having a lot of difficulty maintaining an erection and having a very small member,” her doppelgänger says in the ad.
Scammers appeared to have stolen and manipulated her most popular video — an emotional account of her earlier divorce — probably using a new wave of artificial intelligence tools that make it easier to create realistic deepfakes, a catchall term for media altered or created with AI.
With just a few seconds of footage, scammers can now combine video and audio using tools from companies […]
We live in a culture which is increasingly tolerant of fraud from our food to our politics, and beyond. This article is but one data point in proof of this. AI has nothing to do with intelligence but has everything to do with theft from visual likeness, to music, to literary style. In the same manner that Google has been able to scrape news, at no cost, from legitimate sources and re-present it with no penalty. This is why newspapers have been on the decline now for decades. Their work can be stolen at no cost. This article demonstrates the next iteration of the business model. Thieves will continue to push the boundaries until they hit a hard stop, generally in the form of incarceration. Given that the government is populated by fraudsters of multiple stripes I would not expect recourse soon. This is a culture which has been getting by on literal and political junk food for so long the elites may not recognize or value the wholesome and real.