It was surprisingly easy for me to call Donald Trump from the middle of a tent at the Financial Times Weekend festival last month. The US president answered the phone immediately, chatted about his fondness for London, downplayed US-China tensions and promised that trade talks with post-Brexit Britain would go “fantastically well”.
He conceded that electoral manipulation might disrupt the 2020 presidential vote, before asking: “So are we really having this conversation right now or is this just artificial intelligence?”
The president’s suspicion was right: it was just AI. Mr Trump’s responses, which sounded unnervingly realistic, had been generated by Faculty, a London-based AI company that is working on ways to counter such “deepfake” technologies. One of the best ways of figuring out how to do that is to create deepfake audio and video of your own.