How to protect yourself online after woman duped in AI Brad Pitt dating scam

Yesterday, news broke that an unsuspecting 53 year old woman was scammed out of £700,000, after believing that she was dating Brad Pitt.
Posing as the movie star, the fraudster sent the victim a string of photos, created (often badly) using AI, to convince her that he was undergoing treatment for kidney cancer and needed money.
The interior designer told French channel TF1 that the ordeal started when she received a message on social media from someone claiming to be the actor’s mother after sharing photos of her lavish ski trip to Tignes on Instagram.
Fake photos of Brad Pitt lying in a hospital bed convinced her to hand over her money. It wasn’t until she saw recent images of the Hollywood star with his new girlfriend that she began to suspect she had been scammed.
These are five AI-manipulated mistakes to watch out for:
- Lighting & shadows: Whenever you take a picture, you have to be aware that light affects all objects in the image consistently. This means, shadows should be consistent with the objects; so if you notice that these align unnaturally with the light, it is likely that the image was digitally altered. Focusing on lightning and shadow can guide you to spot whether an element was removed or added to the photo.
- Analyse reflections: reflections, whethere they are on glass, water, windows or shiny surfaces are great indicators for photograph consistency because they’re difficult to be manipulated convincingly. If reflections don’t match position or shape, you’re in the presence of a photograph that was tampered.
- Overly smooth edges & textures: The world is full of different textures, and AI struggles with replicating those realistic bits in the images it produced. For that reason, unnaturally smooth human skin, for example, or an object that looks too finely crafted without particular details are reliable indicators of a fake image.
- Inspect the image borders: Uneven or pixelated edges in people or objects in a photo can give its fakeness away. If images appear blurry or mismatched with the surroundings, it’s often a very sloppy editing job, which some AI is still making.
- Use reverse image search: Using Google Images or the website TinEye, you can upload a photo and see where it appears online. This can reveal if the image has been used elsewhere, potentially with a different context, or if it’s part of a known collection of stock photos.
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