As any habitual social media user, King's College London professor Alan Read did not pay much heed to the occasional deepfakes that would flash up on his feed. Sometimes he would report them, other times he would simply scroll past.
Until one day, an obscure account tagged him in a video featuring his own face.
In it, a synthetic voice nearly identical to that of Dr Read went on a politicised tirade against French President Emmanuel Macron, berating him and other Western leaders as "aboard the Titanic which has 'European Union' written on its hull".
"Almost everything in that video is egregious, and awful to listen to," Dr Read, a seasoned professor of theatre with no connection to politics, told the BBC. "It strikes me as... utterly alien to me."
The avatar of the unwitting Dr Read appeared in a new wave of Russia-linked synthetic videos that swept across social media over the past months, raising concern among security experts that the West must brace for a battle against the Kremlin's influence on the artificial intelligence front.
