The only way to fight deepfakes is by making deepfakes. A cottage industry of deepfake detection startups uses AI to thwart AI.

Reality Defender, Pindrop and GetReal are part of a rapidly growing deepfake detection cottage industry valued at an estimated $5.5 billion as of 2023. These startups use machine learning to identify manipulated media. To fight deepfakes, you have to be able to make them.

The term 'deepfake' refers to a specific type of manipulated media that has been generated with 'deep' learning, but aside from the way they're made, there is no one commonality that unites all deepfakes. They have been used for fraud, harassment and memes. Tools like Grok AI have led to a proliferation of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes, including child sexual abuse material.

For the fake me, we spent some time fine-tuning the voice: fiddling with the consistency, stability, and tone to make it sound more like the actual me. But even then, it wasn’t convincing enough. Family is the toughest test - they know what your voice sounds like.

To be effective, these tools have to work quickly. Generative AI is rather slow. The model we used to call my parents sacrificed quality for speed. Text-to-speech was far better, but it took longer to generate. When we had the voice read Lucky's monologue from Waiting for Godot, it sounded almost exactly like me.