
Wild moment ABC Australia host is targeted by 'deepfake' of reporter
One of the doctors whose likeness was being used was the ABC's own Norman Swan. 'Norman, welcome to 7.30,' said Ferguson as she crossed to the reporter. 'Thank you Sarah, it's a pleasure to be here tonight to talk about deepfake scams that are ripping off vulnerable patients,' Swan said. 'These scams are becoming incredibly convincing.'
The real Norman Swan then stepped into frame, revealing that a fake, AI-generated version of him had been speaking to Ferguson. 'So convincing in fact, that you probably had trouble recognising that that is me,' the real Swan said.
He explained that fraudsters were increasingly using his identity to sell 'dodgy supplements' online. One video on Facebook featured a fake Rebel Wilson talking about losing weight thanks to a supplement which she claimed was recommended by Swan.
Another video followed the same formula but with the singer Adele. The fake videos were surprisingly easy to make, as Swan discovered in an interview with Sanjay Jha from UNSW's School of Computer Science and Engineering.
Mr Jha, who uses AI for teaching purposes, demonstrated that only an internet connection, a laptop, and some free software were necessary to clone Swan's voice and appearance. The professor was quickly able to produce a deepfake of Swan while he sat watching.

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Nabokov's burlesque of tyrannical logic is one of many texts Ghost Cities is in dialogue with. But Ghost Cities most strikingly resembles another Nabokov novel, Pale Fire. Both novels have a long poem at their centre (in loose iambic pentameter); both feature half-comic assassination attempts. They share an ear for the comedy of translation and an eye for the absurd. Ghost Cities both embraces and defies its emperor's directive to abandon 'the pursuit of beauty' for art that favours 'furrowed brows and scholar-like interpretation'. In its zany intertextuality, it displays a level of intellectual ambition rarely found in recent fiction. The 12 stories that make up Highway 13 are all loosely connected to a single man, Paul Biga, the perpetrator of a series of brutal highway murders, whose facts reference (but don't mirror) those of the convicted backpacker murderer Ivan Milat, arrested in 1994. 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In these ways, McFarlane creates space for her marvellous collection to linger with the living, with those bound to each other in their respective presents by fragile forms of love. Theory and Practice takes place primarily in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1986. It is narrated by a female university student, unnamed for most of the novel, who is writing her thesis on Virginia Woolf. 'Theory', she observes with distaste, has 'conquered the humanities', especially the English department where she studies. When compelled to read theorists, rather than the novels she loves, she feels 'headachey and crushed'. Even the work of feminist and postcolonial theorists, which she draws on to help explain her life as a Sri Lankan woman from Sydney, leaves her ambivalent. 'Practice', on the other hand, describes her life as it is lived. In this novel, practice decidedly wins. The narrator is vexed by casual lovers – she is having an affair with a fellow student in a 'deconstructed relationship' – and hypocritical professors. She's also outraged by a diary entry in which Woolf describes Ceylonese freedom fighter EW Perera as a 'poor little mahogany coloured wretch'. Theory and Practice is at its best when it embraces its title's distinction, which it elsewhere compellingly glosses as the distinction between 'realism and reality', through a cast of characters adept at talking their way out of our attempts to interrogate them. The Miles Franklin literary award will be announced on 24 July This article was originally published by the Conversation. Joseph Steinberg is a Forrest foundation postdoctoral fellow in English and literary studies at the University of Western Australia