The Deepfake Dialogues

Anyone’s face, voice, or name can now be synthesised in seconds. So how do you protect a person’s likeness when the unauthorised version can be created from scratch, no manipulation required? Dan Neely, co-founder and CEO of Vermillio and one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, is building the guardrails for the generative internet. Vermillio’s TraceID technology creates a neural fingerpr...

While Congress stalls, state legislatures have quietly become the front line in the fight against deepfakes. This episode features Ilana Beller, who leads Public Citizen’s state legislative work on AI and has helped move model legislation through more than 40 states, focused on the two areas moving fastest: non-consensual intimate deepfakes and election deepfakes. We discuss: * What the Take It Do...

What happens when a local councillor becomes the target of a deepfake smear campaign? In March 2026, a deepfake video of Cllr Pete Kilbane, Labour Deputy Leader of City of York Council, began circulating online. In the clip, his digitally fabricated likeness appeared to hand wads of cash to balaclava-clad men, as if paying them to remove flags. The video was fake. The campaign of intimidation surr...

Content note: This episode discusses AI-generated child sexual abuse material, non-consensual intimate imagery, sextortion, and sexual abuse. AI-powered “nudify” apps are increasingly being used by students to create deepfake sexual images of classmates, but most schools still do not have clear policies for prevention, reporting, discipline, or victim support. Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy fellow at...

AI-generated wildlife videos are flooding social media, and the consequences go far beyond misleading content. Dana Wilson of Wildlife SOS, an Indian nonprofit running 13 rescue centers and emergency hotlines across the country, explains how synthetic animal videos are distorting public understanding of wildlife behavior, putting both people and animals at risk. We discuss: * How Wildlife SOS’s re...

In this episode, I’m joined by Erin D. Dumbacher, Stanton Nuclear Security Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, to discuss her recent Foreign Affairs article “How Deepfakes Could Lead to Doomsday.” We explore how deepfakes and AI hallucinations could infiltrate the systems designed to prevent nuclear catastrophe — and why the story of Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who in 1983 ch...

We spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about what AI does to information: deepfakes, synthetic media, manipulated reality. But there’s a physical cost to all of it that rarely gets discussed: water. Every AI-generated image, every deepfake video, every ChatGPT query runs on servers that need millions of litres of fresh water to stay cool. And those data centers are increasingly being built...

What happens when a dictator dies but deepfake technology keeps him in power? Matthew Fecteau, a US Army Information Operations Officer and PhD researcher at King’s College London, recently coined the term “synthetic sovereign” in The Diplomat. His hypothesis: North Korea could use deepfake technology to keep Kim Jong-un ruling from beyond the grave. We discuss: * Why North Korea may be the only c...

What happens when a single AI-faked text “receipt” can land you in jail? Melissa Sims, a Florida nurse, says she was arrested for allegedly violating a no-contact order after her ex-boyfriend used an AI-enabled fake text generator to create convincing “evidence.” Despite phone records later indicating no text was sent or received, prosecutors pursued the case for months—costing her nursing license...

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Generative AI is not only about viral deepfakes. It also enables synthetic content at scale, including text, audio, and images that can be produced quickly and micro-targeted. Ales Cap, a UCL PhD researcher studying AI and democracy, joins me to discuss what the evidence suggests about deepfakes in elections so far, why measuring impact is difficult without platform data, and why the biggest risks...

Deepfake “nudify” apps are exploding online, but who’s building them, and how do they operate in plain sight? Kolina Koltai, an open-source intelligence investigator at Bellingcat, traces the infrastructure that keeps these services profitable: shell companies, copycat domains, redirect sites, and payment workarounds, and how investigations can pressure operators into shutting down. We discuss: *...

In 1969, President Nixon had a speech ready in case Apollo 11 ended in tragedy. Fifty years later, artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund brought that speech to life using deepfake video and early AI voice cloning, showing Nixon delivering words he never actually spoke. Their Emmy Award-winning interactive documentary In Event of Moon Disaster is both a haunting alternate history and a media...

Deepfakes are supposed to destroy our ability to trust video evidence—but what if that fear rests on flawed assumptions about how we gain knowledge in the first place? Philosopher Dr. Joshua Habgood-Coote (University of Leeds) argues that video has never been a simple window into reality. It’s always been interpersonal knowledge, dependent on trusting the people and institutions behind what was fi...

Content note: This episode discusses non-consensual intimate imagery and sexual abuse. Noelle Martin was 18 when she discovered doctored intimate images of herself across dozens of porn sites. When she spoke out, perpetrators escalated to deepfake videos. A decade later, she’s an Australian lawyer fighting for legal reform—while still being targeted. We discuss: * Why takedowns are often futile, a...

Smartphone footage has transformed how we document war crimes. But what happens when anyone can claim “it’s a deepfake”? Professor Yvonne McDermott-Rees (Swansea University) leads the TRUE Project, investigating how AI-generated media affects trust in user-generated evidence of human rights violations. In this episode, we explore: • Whether the “liar’s dividend” is actually showing up in courtroom...