Generative AI has made it easier than ever before to impersonate somebody else, from scammers using cloned voices of targets for phishing scams to deepfakes of deceased celebrities circulating on OpenAI’s Sora app.
Even Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has gotten considerable media attention this year for his eyebrow-raising theory that mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS could be an alien spacecraft visiting the solar system, has now fallen victim to the trend.
A YouTube channel called “Dr. Avi Loeb” is impersonating the researcher by seemingly using generative AI tools to clone both his likeness and voice, suggesting the topic has sparked enough public interest to be lucrative to scammers.
“Indeed, these videos are fake, produced by AI,” Loeb confirmed in an email to Futurism. “I reported them to YouTube.”
Unlike Loeb, who’s speculated that 3I/ATLAS and other interstellar objects could have technological origins while acknowledging that it’s also likely they’re just naturally occurring objects, the videos on the YouTube channel are extremely sensational, with titles like “3I/ATLAS Is a PROBE — New Data Leaves No Doubt.”
In an addendum to his latest blog post, which discusses the most recent Hubble Space Telescope images of 3I/ATLAS, Loeb explored the broader implications of being impersonated.
“Imagine creating videos that feature avatars of scientists that look like them and speak in their voice, but spread counterfactual information about 3I/ATLAS,” he wrote. “How would the public know who to believe?”
“This is not a plot from a science fiction novel but the reality we face today,” Loeb added. “Over the past two weeks, I received hundreds of emails from fans who noticed a YouTube channel named after me, accessible here, with fake videos about the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, created by artificial intelligence.”
Apart from some very strange jerky movements, the videos on the YouTube page also show a clock that’s “frozen on a specific time” in the background, as Loeb noted, in another clue that they were manipulated and possibly rendered by AI.
“I hold the entity that created the fake videos legally liable to defamation and false content,” he added on his blog. “By now, my fans and I filed dozens of reports to YouTube but the company did not take responsibility to fix this matter.”
The channel is likely violating YouTube’s terms of service. The company’s impersonation policy forbids any “content intended to impersonate a person or channel.”
“If your content violates this policy, we may terminate your channel or account,” the policy warns.
Futurism reached out to YouTube, but didn’t hear back by press time.
As to why anybody would go through all the effort of impersonating him, Loeb offered one possibility.
“The creators can make money from advertising out of a YouTube channel,” he told Futurism in a follow-up email. “I have a very large fan base with more than 5 million readers per month of my essays on Medium.com.”
“Another motivation might be misinformation,” he added.
To date, the offending YouTube channel, which was created in September, has amassed over 1.4 million views. If monetized, the account could’ve made anywhere from $14,000 to $42,000, assuming a payout of one to three cents per view.
The account started impersonating Loeb on November 24. Before then, it had been uploading content in Tagalog that featured a man wearing a lab coat, identified as “Dr. Ricardo Reyes,” who gave health advice such as recommending natural diabetes treatments.
In short, it’s a bizarre flash point that sets a worrying precedent, with platforms dragging their feet on taking down clear AI impersonations.
“We are living in a new reality where fake content can be easily generated by AI,” Loeb wrote on his blog. “This raises a serious problem of how to authenticate the validity of information on the internet.”
“Science focuses on figuring out the physical reality based on facts,” he added. “The nemesis of science is fake content created by AI.”
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