Just hit 100 flagged deepfakes in my personal log

I started keeping a spreadsheet last year after seeing a fake of the mayor of my town, Cedar Rapids, giving a speech he never gave. I figured I'd maybe catch a dozen. Hitting triple digits this morning made me realize how much this garbage is actually floating around, not just with celebrities. What's the most obscure local figure you've seen faked?

3 comments

3 Comments

wood.uma3d ago

Our local high school football coach got faked last fall.

thomasgonzalez3d ago

What kind of fake are we talking about, like a fake punt or a trick play? That happened to our coach a few years back on a big fourth down. We started having our scout team run the weirdest trick plays they could think of every Thursday. It didn't stop every trick, but it made our guys way less likely to fall for the obvious stuff. Just getting them to expect the unexpected helped a ton.

morganmartinez3d ago

Oh man, that's wild... a friend of mine found a deepfake of our old middle school principal "announcing" the school was adding a three-day weekend every week. It got shared so much in parent groups before someone figured it out. Makes what @thomasgonzalez said about expecting the unexpected feel really true now, but for totally different reasons.