(Credit: X/DylanOnChips)
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If you thought something was off during Nvidia's October 28 GTC keynote, you might have been watching a deepfake stream. As the real event unfolded in Washington, DC, an AI version of the same event was also live streaming and attracted almost seven times the viewers.
Unfortunately, deepfake CEO Jensen Huang wasn't discussing the future of GPUs and AI data centers, but was instead promoting a cryptocurrency scam with an appropriately dangerous QR code that you should definitely never scan.
CRN senior editor Dylan Martin spotted the fake stream and tweeted about it before it was taken down. Unfortunately, however, the stream was live for nearly an hour on a channel called NVIDIA Live. It was also the top result on YouTube if you searched "Nvidia GTC DC" at the time, according to TechRadar. This gave the scam a potentially huge reach, with the stream peaking at 95,000 viewers. While some of them were probably bots, that's a lot more than the 12,000 who were viewing the official stream at the same time.
Martin got a transcription of deepfake Huang's presentation, and it showed the phony Huang talking up Nvidia hardware's capabilities for cryptocurrency mining. The stream then posted a QR code that would help viewers get set up with a new "crypto distribution" platform.
Those who saw the stream claim it wasn't hugely convincing thanks to stilted delivery and odd pacing. For a casual viewer, however, especially someone unfamiliar with Huang's presentation style, this might be easy enough to miss.
Ironically, this comes one week after YouTube launched a new Likeness Detection tool, designed to help online platforms combat deepfakes. Did Nvidia not have access to the tool?
In a post-Sora 2 world, these scams are likely to proliferate. Deepfakes are much easier to create, so it's essential that we all learn how to spot them and always verify that the video is legitimate and originates from a credible source before trusting anything it says or shows us.
Scammers pulled off a similar crypto scheme last year with an AI-generated Elon Musk.