Young women’s faces are being stolen online by AI technology and used for propaganda – a sinister practice that has far-reaching consequences.
21-year-old Olga Loiek from Ukraine, studying at the University of Pennsylvania, faces a scary reality: her face and voice were used for advertising on Chinese social media without her consent. This is reported by “BBC”.
The result was a digitally created duplicate of her that appeared on multiple accounts, each with a different name such as Sofia, Natasha, April or Stacy. Unrealistically, these “girls” spoke Mandarin and promoted Russian products, even though Olga had never learned Mandarin and her family lives in Ukraine.
The main account using her digital twin was “Natasha Imported Food,” which had over 300,000 followers and highlighted the virtues of Russia. The BBC reports that many of the videos contained messages of friendship between China and Russia as well as food advertisements.
The company HeyGen, which is said to have developed the tool for AI replication, reacted to the case and blocked further use of Olga’s image. The company claimed its system was hacked to create the unauthorized content. However, Angela Zhang from the University of Hong Kong pointed out that such cases are very common in China and the country is a center for counterfeits, misuse of personal data and deepfakes.
In any case, Olga Loiek emphasizes that she is “100 percent sure” that she will not be the last victim of AI fakes.