2025 has been the year of AI and AI hype from Agentic AI to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to Robots, chatbots and more but, for me, it has been the year of Deep Fake AI.
It all started with the story of the French woman who got duped into a fake AI relationship with Brad Pitt who, being stuck in hospital with no cash, got her to send him $1 million. In other words, it’s been the year of the deep fake romance scam.
This built on my favourite deep fake display by Raft AI on Britain’s Got Talent last year.
The basics is that you find someone who vaguely looks like person you are trying to fake, map their face and then overlay with the fake face through AI, and the first time I encountered such skullduggery was the deep fake Tom Cruise.
The thing is that technology is now getting so sophisticated that you can pretty much fool anyone into believing they are dealing with you. Obviously, it is easy to use such technologies for nefarious purposes, such as political extremism.
Imagine Russia hitting the next elections with fake Trump’s and von der Leyen’s and Lagarde’s and you get the idea.
There is then also the controversial side of deep fake facial scans. The most recent one is the third court hearing in London of the resurrection of the classical English actor Peter Cushing for Star Wars.
The issue is that he originally contracted with Tyburn Film Productions to play the part of imperial commander Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars IV: A New Hope back in 1977, the first Star Wars movie of the series. He was brought back to ‘life’ as the Commander in the Star Wars spin-off film Rogue One in 2016 with permission of his estate. However, the original contract with Tyburn was still in force, and their contract said that prohibited the reproduction of his appearance via special effects without Tyburn’s explicit permission.
It is a huge dispute between Tyburn and Lucasfilm and the company that reproduced Cushing’s face for Rogue One Lunak Heavy Industries, but is it any wonder that actors are worried about AI technologies as any of their faces could be ‘stolen’ to produce rogue films.
So yes, 2025 for me has been the year of everything fake from romance scams to famous faces being ripped off – near enough literally – to enable any sort of fraud or crime. Everything might be fake ... mind you, we might just be living in the Matrix.
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...