Over the weekend, AI-generated audio of vice president JD Vance saying Elon Musk is “cosplaying as a great American leader” who is making the administration “look bad” circulated widely on social media. On Sunday, Vance’s communications director William Martin said on X that “This audio is 100% fake and most certainly not the Vice President.” Martin’s post had quoted another X post that shared the audio, but that post has since been deleted.
While we don’t know which specific piece of software was used to create the audio, deepfake and AI-generated disinformation firm Reality Defender’s software detected the audio as “likely fake.”
"We ran it through multiple audio detection models and discovered it to be a likely fake,” a Reality Defender spokesperson told me in a statement. “The background noise and reverb were also likely added to deliberately mask the quality of the actual deepfaked audio for further obfuscation."