Deepfakes have moved quickly from a digital curiosity to a real and growing systemic threat to national security and public trust. The recent Grok controversy, alongside a surge in politically motivated deepfakes, shows how easily this technology can be used to mislead the public, distract decision‑makers and create uncertainty during live incidents.
Regulators in the UK are now investigating X after the platform’s AI tool was used to generate explicit deepfakes of women and minors. This is being treated as intimate-image abuse and child sexual exploitation. Under pressure, X has since restricted the Grok feature used to edit images of real people and reiterated its zero-tolerance policy for “sexual exploitation, nonconsensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content”. These cases show how quickly a platform‑level feature can become a vector for harm.
Deepfakes are also changing the tempo of information operations. They have become a readymade tool for grey zone warfare: cheap, accessible content that can harass individuals, undermine institutions and overwhelm regulators at a fraction of the cost of conventional operations. They don’t replace traditional intrusion methods, but they make social engineering and misinformation far faster to produce and spread. A convincing fake can now be generated in minutes rather than weeks. This turns social media feeds, press conferences and video calls into a new attack surface. As deepfakes become more prevalent and sophisticated, the public needs greater awareness of the rising risks.
Widespread disinformation and disruption
On an individual level, deepfakes have been used to silence critics or intimidate journalists. For businesses and governments, the main risk is disruption. Recent incidents have shown how deepfakes can distort fast‑moving crisis situations. During the Bondi Beach attack, a fabricated video of Australia’s federal police commissioner – watermarked to look like a Guardian report – falsely claimed that four Indian nationals had been arrested. It gained hundreds of thousands of views before factcheckers identified it as fraudulent. This flooding of information channels with plausible but false statements can delay emergency responders, journalists and governments at times when it is most important to move quickly and decisively. In that confusion, attackers can exploit the distraction to target payments, communications systems or logistics.
State-aligned actors and organised crime groups are already experimenting with synthetic media to support influence operations, extortion attempts and fraud. These range from serious national security threats to environments as seemingly benign as LinkedIn. Competitors posing as recruiters can mine sensitive information on a company while masking their face and voice.
Recently, the real accelerant has been accessibility. Capabilities that once required specialist knowledge and large budgets are now embedded into consumer grade tools and social platforms, with minimal oversight. Over the next year, barriers to entry will only continue to fall, and it will soon be possible to create persuasive deepfakes on a smartphone. This proliferation is why relying on ‘spot the glitch’ media literacy alone is no longer enough.
More sophisticated countermeasures
Relying on the public to identify deepfakes visually isn’t realistic anymore, as many are now generated with common models that produce far fewer obvious artefacts. But computer programmes can still detect the microscopic inconsistencies that humans may miss.
Tools like Google’s SynthID, released for its generative AI products, embed imperceptible markers directly into AI-generated content during creation. This means the content’s origins can be verified later, even if the file has been manipulated. This approach is less vulnerable to tampering because identification markers are integrated at generation level rather than removable metadata.
There are also specialised AI forensics platforms that can flag facial manipulation and voice cloning in alleged news clipsand other media, analysing micro-expressions, lighting anomalies and lip-sync errors that betray synthetic origins. Social media platforms are also beginning to use machine learning systems to detect synthetic media at scale and escalate suspicious content for human review or automatic removal under their policy frameworks. While imperfect, these tools form a crucial first line of defence against the influx of synthetic content.
Over time, these safeguards are likely to become as ubiquitous and inconspicuous as antivirus software – background tools that sit on phones and laptops and quietly assess incoming media and messaging for synthetic risk and warning users in real time. In parallel, governments and industry are exploring stronger identity layers, such as cryptographic “digital fingerprints” tied to verified users, alongside biometrics, so that high stakes transactions and official communications can authenticated without guesswork. This shift would fundamentally change how we authenticate identity and content in digital spaces.
The future is “hyperdigital”
In the short term, we’re likely to see a degree of pushback. Individuals and organisations may default to manual verification or insist on in-person checks, simply because they no longer trust what they see online. But as defensive tools develop and public awareness improves, the way we approach digital communication will shift again. In a “hyperdigital” future, we may each eventually have our own personal AI-powered agents that act as firewalls, screening content before we even see it, or filtering out attempts to impersonate our voices and faces, or those of our friends and colleagues.
In the meantime, we need to reframe the conversation around deepfakes, shifting from treating them as isolated incidents of misinformation to recognising them as a persistent, evolving threat to how institutions operate under pressure. Every organisation should invest in routine synthetic‑media checks across communications and audit digital footprints that hostile actors could use to harvest voice samples, images or brand elements for convincing fakes.
There is a need for better understanding of how adversaries test new technologies, and for a more agile way to turn early-stage ideas into tools people can use. As the UK government looks to strengthen resilience to misinformation, synthetic media must now be key part of that agenda. Industry, government and platform providers will all need to move faster if they are to keep up with the pace of modern digital threats.
Matt Albans
Matt Albans has spent the last 25 years in the Defence Industry, and worked for various organisations, both Government and Industry providing technical expertise from some of the UK’s biggest platform programmes to some of its most cutting-edge research. His wide-ranging technical know-how has seen him seconded into the Headquarters of both the Royal Navy and British Army, most recently to act as the CTO of RAPSTONE. He has also held the Chair of the Defence Research and Technology Forum at Tech UK. He is currently the CTO of Roke, one of the UK’s most trusted providers of Defence and National Security capability. Matt finds Roke hugely rewarding, helping to deliver actual capability that protects our citizens and armed forces across the world.
