Michael Mosley is among a number of TV doctors who have been “deepfaked” on social media to promote health scams, an investigation has claimed.
Mr Mosley and other doctors, including Hilary Jones and Rangan Chatterjee, are being used to promote products which claim to fix high blood pressure and diabetes, as well as to sell hemp gummies, according to the British Medical Journal.
“Deepfaking” is the use of artificial intelligence to map the digital likeness of a person’s face and place it on a body that isn’t their own to create videos.
In a report on Wednesday the BMJ, revealed one video, posted on Facebook, had been created of Dr Hilary Jones promoting a drug purported to be a cure for high blood pressure while on the Lorraine programme.
The BMJ said it has uncovered more videos of this nature although it did not specify how many the investigation found.
Henry Ajder, an expert on deepfake technology, told the publication: “Over the past year we’ve seen huge growth in this form of deepfake fraud, particularly on YouTube and X. Many are selling fraudulent cryptocurrencies, investment schemes, or medical products, with varying degrees of sophistication.”
Dr Jones employs a social media specialist to trawl the web for videos that misrepresent his views and tries to take them down.
“Even if you do, they just pop up the next day under a different name,” he said.
Spotting deepfakes can be tricky too, said Mr Ajder, as the technology has improved.
He added: “It’s difficult to quantify how effective this new form of deepfake fraud is but the growing volume of videos now circulating would suggest bad actors are having some success.”
John Cormack, a retired doctor based in Essex who worked with The BMJ, said: “The bottom line is, it’s much cheaper to spend your cash on making videos than it is on doing research and coming up with new products and getting them to market in the conventional way.”
A spokesperson for Meta, the company that owns both Facebook and Instagram, on which many of the videos found by Cormack were hosted, told The BMJ: “We will be investigating the examples highlighted by the British Medical Journal.
“We don’t permit content that intentionally deceives or seeks to defraud others, and we’re constantly working to improve detection and enforcement. We encourage anyone who sees content that might violate our policies to report it so we can investigate and take action.”