Elon Musk responds to eerily accurate crypto deepfake scam of himself

Elon Musk shut down a deepfake that showed "him" encouraging people to invest in an illegitimate trading scheme. The clip soon went viral across Twitter, forcing the Tesla CEO to respond: "Yikes. Def not me."

A deepfake is a video of a person who has been digitally altered through artificial intelligence to appear as someone else. The method is often used to spread false or malicious information.

Some clips are more technologically advanced than others – luckily in this instance, people cottoned on.

Crypto scammers manipulated the original footage from Musk's TED Talk featuring curator Chris Anderson in Vancouver earlier this year. The phoney robotic voice discussed a "new investment project" that promises "30 per cent dividends every day for the rest of their life." The scam was put out by BitVex, a fake trading platform.

Many responses highlighted how badly produced the clip was, with some harsh comments suggesting that those gullible enough to believe it deserve to be scammed.

Billy Markus, the co-founder of Dogecoin, said: "Someone stupid enough to invest in that deserves to lose their money, but at the same time, the scammers deserve to spend their life in jail,"

He added: “Like literally anyone watching that and thinking it’s real would lose their money to anything."

One user mirrored Markus' comments: "Deep fakes still not quite ready yet, anyone fooled by this deserves to b scammed," they said.

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Along with Musk's response, the clip sparked a conversation surrounding deepfakes and the potential danger they could hold in the future.

"This will be the future of scams," one Twitter user declared. "Real-time deepfake soon, and you won't even know who you're talking to on zoom. Who's developing tools to battle this?"

Another suggested that due to technology advancing so fast, "we will not be able to distinguish what is real or not."

A third added: "Deep Fake is going to be a bigger problem than people are imagining right now."

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