UN AI adviser warns about the destructive use of deepfakes

But it’s not just famous people that are at risk. Ordinary day civilians can also be affected.

"We hear the stories about the famous people, it can actually be done to anybody. And deepfake actually got started in revenge porn," Sahota said. "You really have to be on guard."

Sahota added that the way to spot manipulated media is through video and audio that appear off.

"You got to have a vigilant eye. If it's a video, you got to look for weird things, like body language, weird shadowing, that kind of stuff. For audio, you got to ask… 'Are they saying things they would normally say? Do they seem out of character? Is there something off?'" he noted.

Not enough

Sahota also argued that currently policymakers are not doing enough in terms of educating the public on the many dangers of deepfakes and how to spot them. He recommended that a content verification system be implemented that would use digital tokens to authenticate media and identify deepfakes.

"Even celebrities are trying to figure out a way to create a trusted stamp, some sort of token or authentication system so that if you're having any kind of non-in-person engagement, you have a way to verify," he told CTVNews.ca.

"That's kind of what's starting to happen at the UN-level. Like, how do we authenticate conversations, authenticate video?”