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A video purporting to show Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and accomplice, strolling through Quebec City has garnered millions of views since it was posted last week.
It’s fake.
The original poster, a 19-year-old from Quebec City, told CBC News as much and retroactively added a disclaimer label warning of the use of AI.
In a message to CBC News, the poster said he used the website to perform face swapping, the act of digitally transplanting one person’s face onto another’s body. According to the poster, the process was very easy. They declined to give their names, saying they had received multiple threats since the video was released.
Despite the AI label, fresh comments are still pouring in from users demanding to see the original footage to debunk the theory that Maxwell is not actually sitting in a Texas prison serving his sentence. 20 years imprisonment Charged with aiding and abetting Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage girls.
For Concordia University professor Florent Michelot, the virality of the video and the conspiracy theories it spawned are not at all surprising.
“Conspiracy theories are very easy to understand,” he said, comparing them to “fast food for the brain.”
Viewing frame by frame, viewers can see the moment the filter activates, and also notice the discrepancy between the high resolution of “Maxwell’s” face and the blurring of the surrounding image.
The video shows a woman wearing a blue coat talking to a man outside Snack Keb on Rue Saint-Jean. When she faces the cameraman, a filter kicks in to make her look like Maxwell.
Maxwell is currently a registered prisoner at the federal prison in Bryan and will be eligible for release in 2037. She also attended U.S. Congressional hearings. earlier this month.
The Quebec City video has been shared thousands of times, including on Russian state media outlet RT’s X account, and purports to show a “Quebec woman with a striking resemblance to Ghislaine Maxwell.”
However, “sighting” of the virus is no proof.
In an Instagram Story uploaded over the weekend, the person who posted the video explained that the goal was “in no way to spread misinformation, but to create satirical content.”
Their pages are filled with similar deepfakes, including depictions of Epstein, Prime Minister François Legault, Prime Minister Mark Carney, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
glitches won’t save us
Although the poster’s video contains obvious flaws, relying on those flaws to identify AI-generated videos will soon become an outdated verification method, Michelo said. Rather, the solution to parsing the vast amounts of information that the Internet spews out to its users every day lies in democratizing media literacy.
Notably, he points to a Belgian government agency. media higher education institutions, Develop media literacy materials and resources for educators, students, and the general public.
No such agency exists in Canada, Michelo said, and most of the work on increasing media literacy is done by non-profit organizations like MediaSmarts.
“Some governments in Europe, for example, understood what was behind such videos because there were diplomatic implications, political implications, extremist influences, etc.”
“I don’t think our government has a clear understanding of the situation.”
In the meantime, he says journalists and academics need to be wary of quickly dismissing conspiracy theories because some of them are true.
For example, the CIA conducted human experiments to develop mind control technology, and the oil and gas company ExxonMobil knew about climate change in the 70s.
“We need to be self-critical about how we handle events like the Epstein file a few years ago. [to] Understand how we eat [into] “How some people treat this event today,” he said.
