Ai, ai for AI faking it..

It used to be that any villain, unmasked on the pages of a newspaper for something he or she said, would cry "I was misquoted," or "I was quoted out of context".

- Brendan Sel-ery

But a colleague recently pointed me to the new, and much more diflicult to disprove, excuse: "the video (or soundclip) was faked.," It used to be comparatively simple to determine whether a piece of electronic communication had been doctored. Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes that trickier now. This week, on X, I watched a spoofvideo put together by creative people using easily available AI tools. It showed all the world's leaders in various odd situations: Kamala Harris drunkenly swigging on a bottle of wine; Donald Trump pufling a cigar in a limo surrounded by hookers, Vladimir Putin in tweeds, brandishing a hunting rifle as Ukrainian flags flutter behind him; Hillary Clinton running with ghetto gangs, bottle of vodka in one hand and a.45 automatic in the other.. The amazing thing about the video was how real it was -I believed I really was looking at a video of French president Emmanuel Macron pedalling a kiddie's tricycle while holding a baguette. And