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We all know that there is an abundance of scams out there on the old World Wide Web. But with the evolution of AI, they’ve gotten a lot harder to identify.
No more are we being contacted by an African Prince down on his luck. It’s Johnny Depp sending you personal voice notes, or a video of Elon Musk inviting you to invest millions of dollars into a nonexistent cryptocurrency.
And they are so convincingly real you would never believe it was AI-generated. Or more specifically: A Deepfake.
Luckily, I found a very useful defence against it at CES from McAfee who have endeavoured to finally bring AI onto our side with the world’s first Deepfake detector.
What is it?
The McAfee Deepfake detector is a security tool designed to identify and avoid online scams that utilise AI. It works entirely in the background to scan the content you are viewing and detect whether any of it has been made using AI.
If you are watching a YouTube video for example, McAfee will scan the content without you having to lift a finger and then warn you if there are AI fingerprints present.
So far, it is only available on Lenovo AI laptops, but it is going to be a huge game changer in the future. It’s made my awards list for a bunch of reasons, especially as a guy who works in tech and therefore spends a LOT of time online.
But here’s just a few:
There’s nothing quite like it
McAfee has taken the initiative here while most of the world has sat around saying we need to ‘tackle AI’ without doing anything about it. This is the world’s first publicly available Deepfake detector. That alone deserves recognition.
But I particularly like how poetic this all is; fighting AI with AI. Morally good uses of AI are far too rare considering the power it offers us so it’s reassuring to see McAfee trying to turn the tables.
McAfee’s Deepfake detector uses McAfee Smart AI to detect AI influence. Quite frankly I’m shocked this doesn’t exist already, but I’m glad it does.
It is multiplatform
Something that sets this detector apart is the fact that it offers multi-platform coverage. Which sounds very boring but I assure you is very useful.
Unlike many scam detection tools that focus solely on one medium (like emails or websites), the McAfee Deepfake Detector works across multiple platforms, including social media, messaging apps, and websites.
As I mentioned earlier, it does all of this without needing your input. You simply get an alert from the software when watching something telling you that AI influence has been detected. I’m expecting software like this to become standard practice across devices in future and I’m sadened that it hasn’t made its way onto all of the latest smartphones’ AI software.
Who cares about message summaries when you could have genuinely useful stuff like this helping you out.
It tells you why something is actually a threat
Instead of simply blocking suspicious content, McAfee provides clear alerts along with explanations on why something is considered dangerous.
This not only protects users in the moment but also educates them on identifying scams in the future. That’s helpful to everyone using the internet. Especially because when it comes to scams, ignorance isn’t bliss.
And before you sit there and say ‘only old people fall for scams’, just you wait until deepfakes become even more sophisticated. We’ll all be asking for software like this very soon.
It’s desperately needed
McAfee claims that 59% of Americans say they or someone they know has fallen for an online scam in the last 12 months, with scam victims losing an average of $1,471.
It was a depressingly unsurprising figure to read but more surprising to realise that without intervention or defence, it’s going to get worse. Like I said before, AI is evolving, fast.
Just one ten minute scroll on X these days will bring you face to face with some form of AI generated rubbish. The more you see, the more victims there are. We need things like the McAfee Deepfake detector to start rolling out now so we’re not playing catch-up which I already fear we are to an extent.
Conclusion
The McAfee Deepfake detector pioneers a new field of computer security, identifying threats in real-time helping us to adapt to the ever-changing tactics of scammers.
Products like this will soon become an essential bit of kit for anyone using the internet. And that’s pretty much everyone, right? Well, I suppose if you’re reading this then you can’t disagree. McAfee has come along just in time with this and I am genuinely excited to see how they continue to use AI for good.
A worthy CES award winner if ever I saw one!
This post is supported by McAfee
