Last month, something that I have been waiting to see for years finally happened. Russia managed to broadcast in Ukrainian social media a clip of President Volodymyr Zelensky telling Ukrainians to surrender to the Russians; that the war was ending. I first saw the story on WION’s YouTube Channel — a freshly minted critical online news outlet from India, which is trying to establish its presence.
So I watched WION’s (rather good and accessible) piece about how Russia created this deepfake video of Zelensky instructing Ukrainians to down their arms and spread it to Ukraine and beyond. Of course it didn’t work because deepfake still has an uncanny valley problem. Ukrainians immediately and instinctively knew that this “Zelensky” was strange.
