I tried to prove I'm not AI. My aunt wasn't convinced

I asked experts if I'm real. Bad news. Even my aunt wasn't sure if I was a deepfake. AI is so convincing that a sitting prime minister struggled to prove he's alive. You might be next.

I called up my aunt Eleanor a few days ago and asked her to help with an experiment. "It's for an article," I said. I had explained I was going to call her back and she'd either be talking to the real me or an AI deepfake. Could someone who's known me my whole life tell the difference?

At first, my aunt wasn't buying that any AI was involved. "Well, it sounds like you," she said. "I think a real person uses a lot more inflection than I would expect an AI-generated voice to use." That might be true, I told her, but AI is getting pretty advanced. There was a long pause. "I was like 90% sure," she said, hesitating. "But that sounded more artificial."

When we talk about deepfakes, the typical concern is about you getting tricked. Rightly so. AI fakery has been used to scam people out of large sums of money, spread misinformation and even attempt to sway elections. But what if the shoe was on the other foot? What if someone accuses you of being a deepfake? How do you prove you're real?

That's a question Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to ask himself this month. He posted a video where a trick of the light made it look like he might have a glitchy sixth finger on his right hand, once a clear giveaway of AI deepfakes. The internet exploded with rumours that Netanyahu had died in a missile strike and Israel was covering it up. Days later, the prime minister posted a follow up video from a coffee shop, where a smiling Netanyahu held his hands up to demonstrate he had the ordinary number of fingers.

This, experts tell me, is the first time the leader of a major world power has openly tried to prove they're not AI – and it failed, miserably.

As you read this, a large number of people are still convinced Netanyahu is dead (and they'll tell you I'm part of the conspiracy for saying otherwise). But his proof-of-life videos made some very basic mistakes. Could I do any better? Is it still possible to prove you're not a robot? I called the experts to find out, and I'll give you a preview: things aren't good.

This actually happened to me in the wild. A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about an underused Google privacy setting. I got so worked up that I shared a link to the setting in my family group chat and urged everyone to click on it. But my mom was immediately suspicious. Good call, this was weird behaviour. I think I had too much coffee.

"How do I know this is really Tom and not some weird scammer?" she wrote. "Say something a scammer couldn't say." I had to think, but eventually I landed on a nickname my parents used when I was a kid. She was satisfied, but this is a lot more challenging when you're dealing with people who don't know you. Let's say you're Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, and the audience is the whole world.

Every expert I asked said Netanyahu's videos are unambiguously real. Jeremy Carrasco, co-founder of Riddance, an independent publication focused on AI-generated media, didn't take long to reach that conclusion. "In short, they're all real, and they are all just showing normal things that happen in videos," Carrasco says. The supposed sixth finger, for example, is light reflecting off Netanyahu's palm he says. It looks weird if you hit pause at the right moment, but that's all it is.

"Six fingers is not an AI thing anymore," Carrasco says. The best AI tools stopped adding extra........

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