• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 19, 2024

If you click on the video above, you can hear for yourself. But no, it's not Donald J. Trump. Or John Barron of John Miller or David Dennison or any of the many fake personas he has used himself, but a not-so-deep fake courtesy of AI voice generator Parrot.ai.

I created that video in seconds after first reading about it in a dispatch from NewsGuard this morning, which reported on how deepfake tools like it were being used by disinformation campaigns by Iranian state media faking military success against Israel.

You can see NewsGuard's reporting, as well as samples of Iran's deepfake videos here.

You can also see an update on its unreliable AI-generated news site tracker, which has identified 802 to date.

The post also includes a link to Parrot.ai so you can play around with it and create your own, which no doubt is a lot of fun -- but not in the way JibJab videos were a dozen or so years ago, because unlike JibJab, some users may not know these are fabrications.

And that's the point of Trump's endorsement of "Red, White & Blog" today: We all need to be skeptics and question the source and authenticity of unverified news, video and other content that might be trying to misinform us.

In the meantime, thank you, John... er, I mean, David... er, I mean Donald. Or whoever you really are.