Deepfake Video of Elon Musk Promising Double the Money Goes Viral on YT

Hyderabad: Deepfakes and morphed videos have become a major source of trouble for everyone. In the latest instance, a deepfake video of Elon Musk went viral on YouTube where the Tesla founder is asking people to give him money, and he would repay double that amount. Similar videos have appeared before as well. According to a BBC report, a fake Musk giveaway scam cost a man from Germany £400,000 recently.

Sometime back, a deepfake video of actress Rashmika Mandana had gone viral.

However, although many such cases have been reported, none of them have been registered with the cybersecurity bureau. According to its director Shikha Goel, no complaints related to deepfake videos were registered with them, though 14 complaints related to morphed videos were registered recently. Goel said that these cases usually involve morphing of images of victims in loan apps scams.

Recently, a morphed video of Union home minister Amit Shah had also gone viral, leading to the arrest of five persons.

How are morphed videos different from deepfakes?

The latter involves altering a person's image, video, audio or other forms of media. This is something similar to morphing but the difference lies in the intention behind the creation of such a media.

While morphing is meant only to have fun, deepfakes can be used to cause harm to a person. The word deep in deepfakes stands for deep alteration and the word fake indicates that the media circulated is generated using AI.

Deepfakes, altered deeply, can make it difficult for the viewer to differentiate between the fake and real, posing threat to the accountability of the content circulated on social media, while morphed videos can be differentiated from real.