VIDEO — 26 Dec 2025

Deepfakes, cloned voices and AI-generated disinformation

A CDT video with staged examples of how AI fakes faces and voices, and advice on checking content before you share it.

Published in

CDT Crna Gora

Role

Speaker

In this short video for CDT I show how artificial intelligence is changing the world of disinformation, from text and photos to video and cloned voices, and how to check what you see before you share it.

Faces, voices and events that never existed

The video opens with staged examples in which artificial intelligence turns me into a completely different person, and a friend’s cloned voice calls to ask for money urgently after an accident. AI can create faces, voices and even events that never existed, sometimes for good and more often for bad, so the line between truth and lies keeps getting thinner.

Text, photos, video and voice

—AI writes whole articles, blogs and even scientific papers that look completely authentic. It can imitate the style of well-known portals and create fake news or conspiracy theories that spread at the speed of light, in huge amounts and in very little time.
—It creates photos of people who do not exist, or puts real people in situations they were never in. The viral image of Pope Francis in a big, modern white jacket went around the world and many people believed it was real, although AI had made it, which shows how photorealistic and convincing such content can be.
—Video is perhaps the most dangerous form. We have seen fake videos of world leaders, such as one in which Emmanuel Macron supposedly kisses a man, or a video of Ukrainian President Zelensky behind bars, shown in New York. They were exposed as fakes relatively quickly, but their aim was to cause chaos and distrust.
—Voice is what we perhaps least expect, and a few seconds of someone’s voice are enough for AI to clone it. That is how a fake anti-Western speech by the leader of Burkina Faso was made, and why a voice message from a family member asking for money may not come from them at all.

Stop and check before you share

Our best defence against disinformation is critical thinking and the ability to question the world around us. Before you share something, stop, check the source and see whether several reliable media have published the news, and local portals such as Raskrinkavanje analyse and expose exactly this kind of manipulation every day. Look for inconsistencies in photos and videos, and be sceptical of anything that sounds too shocking to be true.

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