Plummeting Costs of AI Deepfakes Raises Risk of ‘Fake News’ for General Election

Fenimore Harper Communications has conducted a ‘Red Team’ exercise on the generation of misinformation using AI to understand what techniques may be used by people.

Key Findings

• A ‘Red Team’ operation found that with just £100, anyone can create 10 hours of compelling deepfake ‘fake news’ reports.

• See peration outputs: 9 deep-faked videos of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Opposition Leader Keir Starmer and mainstream news presenters produced for less than £1 in under 30 minutes.

• Most widely available platforms allow users to create high-fidelity deep-fakes of news presenters within minutes.

• Widely available large language models (such as ChatGPT) can be made to produce harmful misinformation with less than 200 characters of ‘prompt hacking’.

• Open source models allow for voice clones of political candidates to be created within minutes, despite being blocked by major platforms.

  
  
  
  A preview can be seen on Channel 4 News’ website.