What a viral fake video of Ghislaine Maxwell in Quebec City says about AI deception

A picture purporting to demo Ghislaine mx, the former lady friend and confederate of Jeffrey Epstein, out for a stroll in Quebec City has gained millions of views since it was posted last week. 

It’s fake.

Despite the AI labels, fresh comments are still pouring in from users demanding to see the original footage to debunk the theory that Maxwell is, in fact, not sitting in a Texas prison serving a 20-year sentence for helping Epstein sexually abuse underage girls. 

For Concordia University professor Florent Michelot, the video’s virality and the conspiracy theories it spawned are not surprising at all. 

“Conspiracy theories are very easy to understand,” he said, likening them to “fast-food for the brain.”

Seen frame-by-frame, a viewer can see the moment the filter activates and also pick up on the mismatch between the high resolution of “Maxwell’s” face and the blurriness of the surrounding image.

The video shows a woman in a blue coat, speaking with a man outside Snack Québ on St. Jean Street. When she faces the cameraperson, a filter activates to make her look like Maxwell.

Maxwell is currently a registered inmate at Federal Prison Camp Bryan and will be eligible for release in 2037. She also appeared at a U.S. Congressional hearing earlier this month.

The Quebec City video has been shared thousands of times, including by Russian state-owned media outlet RT on its X account, saying it shows “a woman in Quebec looking STRIKINGLY similar to Ghislaine Maxwell.”

But the viral “sighting” isn’t proof of anything.

In an Instagram story uploaded over the weekend, the video's poster explained that their intent "was never to spread misinformation but to make satire content."

Their page is full of similar deepfakes including representations of Epstein, Premier François Legault, Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Though the poster's videos contains clear glitches, Michelot says relying on those imperfections to identify AI-generated videos will quickly become an obsolete verification method. Instead, the solution to parsing through the immense amount of information the internet spits at its users every day lies in democratizing media literacy. 

Notably, he points to Belgium’s government institution, the Conseil supérieur de l’Éducation aux Médias, which develops material and resources on media literacy for educators, students, and the general public.

No such institution exists in Canada, where most of the work around bolstering media literacy has been carried out by non-profits like MediaSmarts, says Michelot.

“Some governments, for example in Europe, understood what is behind such videos because there are diplomatic consequences, there is some political consequences, there is consequences of extremism, for example.”

“I don’t think that our government clearly understands the situation.”

He says, in the meantime, journalists and academics have to be vigilant around how quickly they dismiss conspiracy theories because some are true.

The CIA did experiment on humans in its attempt to develop mind-control techniques, and oil and gas corporation ExxonMobil did know about climate change in the '70s, for example.

“We have to do a self-critique about how we treat events like the Epstein files a few years ago, [to] understand how we feed [into] how some people treat this event today,” he said.

Journalist

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