Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has revealed he is being targeted by a prolific number of AI-generated deepfake videos on YouTube, which show him saying things he never said. The videos, which use his face and synthesise his voice, have proliferated across the platform and social media, prompting him to describe the experience as watching his own digital puppetry.
Varoufakis said he first became aware of the deepfakes when a colleague congratulated him on a video talk. On watching it, he realised the video showed him wearing a blue shirt that had never left his island home. Since then, hundreds of similar videos have appeared, including some depicting a deepfaked version of him making fictitious statements about the coup in Venezuela.
He initially tried to have the videos removed by writing to Google and Meta, but found that while some were taken down, they quickly reappeared under different guises. He eventually gave up, comparing the proliferation to the Hydra of Greek mythology.
Varoufakis, who has written about the concept of technofeudalism, argued that the deepfakes confirm that in this new reality, the liberal individual is dead and buried. He described the appropriation of his audiovisual identity as the ultimate act of feudal enclosure, where tech lords treat users as tenants on their cloud lands.
However, he also offered a more optimistic perspective, suggesting that deepfakes might force people to judge arguments on their merits rather than on the identity of the speaker. He drew on the ancient Athenian concept of isegoria, which he defined as the right to have one's views judged seriously, independently of who one is. He speculated that by debasing authenticity, big tech might inadvertently give isegoria a chance.
