Deepfake influencers are among us already. Can you spot them?

Make way for the deepfake influencers. For the last one year, Artificial Intelligence has been making alarming inroads into the creative landscape of social media in India. More specifically, it has enabled a host of anonymous folks to create Instagram handles that steal content from popular creators and swapping their faces with an AI generated face.

A detailed report by Decode, part of the Boomlive team, has unveiled just how this is being done. Taking the example of ‘Ira Sharma’, an Instagram handle with 2,60,000 followers, the report deconstructs exactly how anonymous handles are able to get away with the deepfake forgeries using face swap technology.

The idea behind it is simple – such deepfake influencers make money for the people behind these ventures through paid brand promotions on platforms like Instagram and YouTube. These deepfake influencers, says the report, are a small but growing subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or virtual influencers that have been around since the last few years. In these handles, the entire content is lifted from authentic creators’ pages and repackaged with a new face, which isn’t a real face but an AI entity.

Decode traced at least three videos, which the account plagiarised and morphed with a generative-AI face, that could be traced back to other women and teenage content creators on Instagram. It also quoted Pushti Shah, a Vadodara based creator with 24,200 followers, one of the creators whose videos were morphed.

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A post shared by Pushti Shah (@pushtishahh)

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A post shared by Ira Sharma (@me_ira.sharma)

Decode also got Professor Mayank Vatsa at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur to analyse the videos, and the analysis determined that all the samples were manipulated or edited and that there were several inconsistencies in each of them.

AI influencers versus deepfake influencers

The field of influencer marketing has been disrupted in a major way since last year with the arrival of Kyra, India’s first virtual influencer. Kyra is already working with brands like Indyverse, BoAt and others and was voted AI Creator of the Year at the NDTV awards last year. Naina, on the other hand, is a brand ambassador for Fikaa, an AI-powered investment app for women. She recently launched her own podcast, ‘The nAIna Show’ that airs on YouTube and features in-depth and insightful interviews with some of the most celebrated personalities in the entertainment industry including Sobhita Dhulipala, Sanya Malhotra, Richa Chadha, Saiyami Kher, Esha Deol, Hansika Motwani, to name a few. Fashion retailer brand Myntra has also launched Maya, calling her Myntra’s first virtual trendsetter, who models Myntra products on its social handles.

Deepfakes need to be tackled

The difference, as the Decode report points out, is that the AI influencers clearly disclose their synthetic/virtual nature, and their content is not plagiarised from someone else’s work. Platforms like Instagram need to implement tech solutions that prevent misuse of content. It is however not so easy. Decode has unearthed YouTube tutorials in Hindi on how to create your own AI influencer to earn money off Instagram through brand promotions. Free online image generators and AI model hosting sites are easily available online for anyone to indulge in deepfake influencing. The report says that it isn’t just social media enthusiasts but some social media marketing agencies too who are indulging in such generative AI plagiarism. Decode also found nine other linked Instagram accounts using variations of the username Ira Sharma and posting the same deepfake content. The main handle me_ira.sharma was also tagging some of the fake accounts in its Instagram Stories. A tenth account, created in January 2021, and using a different fake alias – Ishita Choudhary, was also posting the same videos, the Decode report says.

Interestingly, Ira Sharma already has 260k followers, in spite of not being a real person, and ranks much ahead of Pushti Shah, who has 24.2k followers. Fans of the deepfake influencer are apparently unaware of Ira’s digital origins and each of her videos rakes in anywhere between 50k and 200k likes and an average of 500 comments. Ironically, her bio says she is ‘a normal girl’ but also that she is ‘not real (alien). Anyway, do her fans care?