• Cops say a scammer in northern China has managed to cheat a man out of his money, Reuters reports, by masquerading as his friend with the use of AI-powered face-swapping and voice-cloning software.
• If the tale holds up to scrutiny, the incident would go to show how easy it has become for scammers to deepfake their way to a payday using new AI tools.
• While we’ve come across examples of scammers cloning their voices to extort money out of their victims over the phone, this new incident offers a glimpse of an uneasy future in which a perpetrator can even take on the physical appearance of a victim’s friend. As such, it raises an old specter of modernity: is technology drawing us closer, or tearing us apart?

Tagged: Artificial Intelligence