Reality is the only verification left

I’m in the unhappy position in which people on the internet are trying to act as if they are me.
For example, people send messages to my colleagues at Remote pretending to be me, asking them for banking details or other private information, money, etc.

As long as Remote exists, we have been teaching people to not trust these kinds of messages. At first, we could simply say: don’t trust these channels, verify by asking me in Slack directly, or giving me a call. Unfortunately, that is no longer sufficient.

Today, duplicating somebody’s voice and even duplicating somebody’s likeness through a video has not only become incredibly easy, the quality of those generations is at a degree today where most people will not be able to distinguish between the real and the generated version.

There’s a good chance that somebody calls you, replicates my voice, and you, especially if you are not somebody who literally talks to me every single day, are not able to distinguish by voice alone whether it’s the real me or whether it is a copied voice version of me.

The same is now happening in video. You’re able to clone somebody’s likeness to a degree that is hard to distinguish from reality. With all of these techniques getting better and AI getting better, we can be certain that it will be impossible to verify whether somebody is real from just looking at them talking to a camera.

What remains is reality, seeing somebody in the flesh, talking with them directly, being together in the same room.