Firm uses presenter in advert after it is tricked by AI fake

There was something strange about her voice, they thought. It was not unfamiliar but, after a while, it started to go all over the place.

- Sammy Gecsoyler

The accent of the science presenter Liz Bonnin, as regular BBC viewers know, is Irish. But this voice message, ostensibly granting permission to use her likeness in an advertising campaign, seemed to place her on the other side of the world.

The message, it turns out, was a fake. It was AI-generated to mimic Bonnin's voice. Her management team got hold of it after they saw the presenter's face on online ads for an insect repellent spray, something for which she had not signed up for.

"At the very beginning it does sound like me but then I sound a bit Australian and then it's definitely an English woman by the end. It's all fragmented and there's no cadence to it," said Bonnin, who is best known for presenting Bang Goes the Theory, and Our Changing Planet.

"It does feel like a violation and it's not a pleasant thing. Thank goodness it was just an insect repellent spray and that I wasn't supposedly advertising something really horrid!"

Howard Carter, the chief executive of Incognito, the company behind the botched campaign, says he was sent a number of voice messages by someone he thought was Bonnin. He said these voice messages "clinched it" for him that he was really speaking to her.

He previously sought her endorsement, before being approached by the Facebook profile that adopted Bonnin's identity. He claims the messages exchanged between the two led him to believe she was the real deal despite thinking the profile was "a bit suspect".