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When Elon Musk appeared on my screen to announce that he had developed “new software that has the South African government and big banks running scared”, and for a mere R4,700 investment, I can earn R300,000 per month, I did not hit the ‘learn more’ link.

That seems to make me part of only 20% of South Africans who can tell the difference between a real image and AI-generated (deepfake) nonsense.

By no means does this make me special, but it shows how hard it has become to distinguish between the ‘real’ and the toss – and eight in ten South Africans cannot tell the difference.

According to the latest Kaspersky Business Digitization survey, 42% of employees surveyed in South Africa said they could tell the difference between a deepfake and a real image, yet in reality only 21% could actually tell the difference.

According to Kaspersky, this exposes companies and people to scams that use deepfakes, such as fake videos and images, to deceive desperate people.

“Even though many employees claimed that they could spot a deepfake, our research showed that only half of them could actually do it. It is quite common for users to overestimate their digital skills; for organisations, this means vulnerabilities in their human firewall and potential cyber risks – to infrastructure, funds, and products,” said Dmitry Anikin, Senior Data Scientist at Kaspersky.

Kaspersky is a cybersecurity group based in Russia, but run through a company in London, so you can make with that what you will, but the fact remains that AI is to cyber criminals what a Tommy gun was to Baby Face Nelson.

While the experts recommend that companies “boost the corporate human firewall” with awareness and education programmes to help people spot fakes, it appears little is being done to vet this nonsense from social media. You might fall in the 20% of people who spot a scam, but you may share an online algorithm with the other 80%.

YouTube still loves to remind me that Elon has the answer to my kid’s school fees conundrum, and often even Johan Rupert features in my feed, with a “shocking statement” that could have you “start earning in 15 minutes”.

How is this still allowed? It’s highly doubtful that these billionaires would choose Immediate-Matrix and News of South Africa on YouTube as the mouthpiece for their most exciting investment opportunity yet.

It’s obvious that this needs to be said, but none of these investments, statements, or groundbreaking software seems legit.

It’s also spelled ‘shocked’, not ‘shoked’.

Some of the easily spotted tells are jerky movement, bad lighting, shifts in skin tone, weird blinking or no blinking at all, lips badly synched with speech, and low image quality.  Being sceptical of everything you see online is a good way to avoid falling into these traps.

Nobody on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok has an investment opportunity that quadruples your money in a week. If they did, they wouldn’t share it with you. And billionaires don’t divulge their market secrets in badly edited videos tucked between a clip of a cat riding a skateboard, and a teenager flipping a water bottle.

[source:businesstech]