7mo ago

A Hong Kong-based crypto exchange used deepfakes of Elon Musk to claim the billionaire was its lead developer

www.businessinsider.com A Hong Kong-based crypto exchange used deepfakes of Elon Musk to claim the billionaire was its lead developer

Authorities in Hong Kong put out a warning that a group claiming Elon Musk developed its crypto-trading software is likely using deepfakes.

53 comments

Facebook deep fake nonsense aside, if I genuinely thought Elon was involved in an investment scheme, I would immediately consider it a scam and assume my money would disappear.
- Shitty reputation aside, the guy has never been a developer has he?
  
  He was a developer on whatever company he had that got folded into PayPal. It would be accurate to say that he never was a good developer.
- That said, I did make about an 800% return by investing (a small amount) in Dogecoin immediately after he tweeted that it was his favorite cryptocurrency that one time. Figured his fan club would pump it, and boy did they. I got it at about $0.05 and sold out at $0.40, believe it peaked at $0.58 or so. Wish I'd wagered more than the $250 I did on it.
- The Boring Company for example

Company: Announces Elon Musk is the lead developer
Stock: 📉

Those weren't fake, those were real (there are actual VERIFIED people on Twitter that can back me up on this) Unfortunately, you can't ask elon himself, because he was working with that team on their crypto right before he died.
If you didn't hear about his death, it wasn't widely reported really because he was so insignificant that nobody really cared. But I guess they found that he broke his neck trying to suck his own dick on a ferris wheel. He was wearing small shorts, exerted himself trying to fold in half to reach, shit his pants, the shit hit the floor of the bucket, he slipped in the shit, hit the cage awkwardly and broke his neck.
- Might be hacked accounts. The same happens on facebook. Some friend had their account stolen, and could not get it back. Half a year later the name and profile picture changes to "Elon Musk". Reported it to facebook for Scam and "Impersonating public figure". They have a report category for this exact case, so surely they know that this is a problem and they will take care of it, right? Nope, according to Facebook everything is A-Ok with the account, and no action is taken.
- RIP

Hello everyone , I’m Yilong Musque! Tesla good!

Is it just me who feels like he'd be a good target for early efforts of AI impersonation because he speaks in such a disjointed sort of way to begin with?
- He is a perfect target. Especially since he does so much weird shit it makes anyone willing to believe anything about him.
- I've seen a bunch of ads on Facebook where it's a deepfake of either Elon or Mr Beast. Just goes to show that Meta doesn't give a fuck and will let anything through if you pay them.

I feel like bragging your lead developer is Elon Musk is not something you'd reasonably want to do
- Brings in the right crowd for crypto
  
  Not me. I was interested in the tech and innovations that underlie cryptocurrency since the early 2010s and I’ve disliked and distrusted Musk for as long as I can remember.
  At that time the reddit hive mind loved Musk and was positive towards crypto, now the Reddit Hive mind has realized they actually hate musk and categorically hate crypto. My views haven’t changed (Musk is a shitty narcissistic human, and crypto solves some useful problems despite a deserved reputation for attracting a lot of scammy projects and people).

They should've picked a better person to lie about, especially if it's supposed to be a developer.
- No way. You want someone who's so obviously an idiot that his face alone selects out anyone with critical reasoning faculties.
  Being a deepfake used to find rubes willing to give over money to an obvious scam is the platonic ideal of elon musk. Bravo, grifters. Bravo.
  
  Exactly, just like the Nigerian prince scam. Those who know about the scam or with enough critical thinking ability are not the marks. They want that small percentage of highly gullible people they can fleece easily.
- Yeah! Pick somebody who actually knows tech, like esteemed Academy Award nominated lead developer Margot Robbie, for example.
  (Wait, actually, no, getting involved in crypto is generally a bad idea...)
  
  Ah, I missed you.

Elon, like his favored doge and bitcoin ,has run his course. He started off making sense, looking like he was going to change the world. But now He’s not energy efficient, he’s horrible for the environment, takes forever to get things done and never fully delivers what was promised. It’s time we stop worshiping Elon.
- You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the Pedo Guy.

I've disabled personalised ads on YouTube and I see this sort of shit all the time. I've given up reporting them because 90% of the time the report is rejected. I don't even understand the rationale for rejecting it because it's an obvious a scam as a scam can be - ai impersonation, fake endorsement, illegal advertising category. It's a scam YouTube.
I don't even get why these ads even appear. YouTube has transcription & voice / music recognition capabilities. How hard would it be to flag a suspicious ad and require a human to review it? Or search for duplicates under other burner accounts and zap them at the same time? Or having some kind of randomized audit based on trust where new accounts get reviewed more frequently by experienced reviewers.
- No no. This kind of automated "protection" is only used against their users, who are their product. Not the advertisers, who are their customer!
  
  There are other considerations here though. Google suffers reputational harm if users become victims through their platform. It becomes news, it creates distrust in users, it generates friction with regulators and law enforcement. Users may be trained to be ad averse or install ad blockers. In addition, these ads generate reports which costs time to process even if the complaints are rejected.
  At the end of the day these scammers are not high profile advertisers and they're not valuable. They're burner accounts that pay cents to deliver their ads. They're ephemeral, get zapped, reappear and constantly waste time and resources. Given that YouTube can easily transcribe content and watermark it, it makes no sense to me that they wouldn't put some triggers in, e.g. a new advertiser places an ad that says "Elon Musk", or "Quantum AI" or other such markers, flag it for review.
- How hard would it be to flag a suspicious ad and require a human to review it?
  Hard? No. But then humans would have to be paid which would slow down the growth of the dragon horde.
  Better to have a computer analyze the ad that another computer thinks looks real.
  
  They have to have a human respond to each and every complaint about that ad. Seems more sensible to automate and flag suspicious ads before the complaints happen.
- they ain't gonna stop their customers from paying them more money

Hahahahaha lol, I wish it had gone unnoticed a bit more. Scamming techbros and cryptobros sounds cool.

using deep fakes of billionaires is free speech

Continuing the trend elon continues to look worser physically everytime an article is posted about him

They didn't have to . elon would prolly declare himself the founder on his own and then sue the company and the board of directors if they disagreed with him

The Ancap free market working as intended.

Were they purposely trying to tank the product? 🤔
- Crypto bros have a hard on for Elon, the scam is targeting them specifically.

They really needed to get a statement from Twitter on this. I assume they asked. How are we supposed to know whether or not there was a poop emoji?
- They tried: no company named "Twitter" exists.
  
  When Elon stops allowing deadnaming on his website, I'll stop deadnaming his website.

This isn’t news, it’s been ongoing for quite some time.
- It's news that someone is actually policing advertisements... I've seen dozens of deep fake ads and nothing ever seems to get cracked down on.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
No, Elon Musk didn't create the shady crypto trading website that a random person on Facebook is telling you to invest in.
As the technology behind artificial intelligence advances, scammers are increasingly using deepfakes to dupe their victims into handing over cash.
"Deepfakes" leverage artificial intelligence to mimic the face and voice of a person in a video or audio clip.
The group in Hong Kong claimed to provide a cryptocurrency trading service using underlying artificial intelligence.
Authorities said the group used deepfake videos of Musk to deceive victims into thinking that he was the developer of the technology, lending the fake company an air of legitimacy.
Hong Kong police shut down all of its websites and social media pages, according to Crypto News.
The original article contains 390 words, the summary contains 124 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

How long until we are just posting deep fakes of each other eating shit and society completely breaks down? Wake me when we are there.
- I'm sure someone said the same thing about Photoshop. Somehow we survived.
  
  Oh, I'm kinda just joking.
  The argument could be made, though, that the aptitude for learning photoshop makes it prohibitive to the general masses. Give some dopey fucks the ability to do dopey shit and they will inevitably explore every aspect of it, good and bad.
  
  Some of the deep fried Forwards From Grandma shit I've been seeing has leaned more and more heavily on AI generated crap. When you're already used to the grainy highly-questionable photos posted in the Enquirer, a full length movie of Elon Musk half-melting his way through a speech seems relatively normal and convincing.
  I think its all a double-edged sword.
  On the one hand, the newer tech makes dismissing anything you don't want to believe easier. Photo of Trump stumbling or looking goofy? Deepfake. Not real. They're all out to get him and this is further proof.
  On the other hand, a faked image paired with a weaselly headline can achieve a kind-of Truthiness that is easier to distribute than disprove. Case in point the fake Atlantic headline of Biden falling off his bike that got kicked around Twitter two years back.
  Consider this particularly nefarious use of digital manipulation. Photos of University of Florida student protesters were altered to make them look older in an attempt to support the theory of paid protesters and outside agitation. Often, these images start under "parody" accounts and get screenshoted and recirculated and further deep fried as they pass from account to account.

53 comments