Is Synthetic Media a Poison Pill for Truth?

Synthetic media is no longer just a cyber-awareness topic; it is a management-control problem. For CIOs and business leaders, the issue is not whether deepfakes are technically impressive, but whether the organisation has a clear decision model for who can approve high-risk requests, authenticate executives, and halt transfers when something feels off.

The practical trade-off is speed versus assurance. Every additional verification step reduces the chance of fraud, but it also slows urgent business activity and can frustrate senior leaders who expect convenience. That means controls should be risk-based: tighter rules for payments, payroll changes, supplier banking updates, and sensitive data requests; lighter controls for routine internal collaboration.

Governance matters as much as tooling. Detection software may help, but it cannot replace agreed operating procedures, escalation paths, and accountability for exceptions. Leaders should ask whether finance, HR, legal, security, and communications share a common playbook for impersonation attempts, and whether staff know when to challenge a request even if it appears to come from the top.

The next question is whether synthetic-media defence sits inside cyber, fraud, or enterprise risk, because that choice shapes funding and ownership. Organisations should also decide how to use AI defensively without creating new privacy, false-positive, or trust issues. The real test is not perfect detection; it is whether the business can keep making verified decisions fast enough to stay operational.

You may not have heard of โ€œsynthetic mediaโ€ before, but itโ€™s likely that you have experienced it. Synthetic media is media (like voicemail, video or audio clips) that has been either produced or modified by artificial intelligence. Deepfakes are a common example of synthetic media and how it is deployed. AI-generated videos, images, and audio clips can be created to impersonate real people. Back in January, for example, New Hampshire investigated a deepfake robocall using President Bidenโ€™s voice to discourage people from voting during the primary. That is just one example among many.

Concerns Rising

To the casual observer, deepfakes can be very convincing. The technology can be used in personal, business and societal settings. For instance:
  • Deepfakes could be used to initiate a phone call from someoneโ€™s child or grandchild in distress and asking for money.
  • The technology can be used to impersonate company CEOs or other C-suite leaders, instructing someone in finance to transfer funds or share sensitive information. A finance worker in Hong Kong paid out $25 million on the direction of a fraudulent imitator of his CFO.
  • In broad societal settings, deepfakes can be used for political manipulation or election interference, delivering very convincing voice or video messages from candidates saying things they never said.
Related:Dealing With Deepfakes The technology is not perfect — yet — but it is getting better. We are in the salad days with AI. For instance, the Microsoft VASA-1 project is quite frightening in terms of its potential. VASA stands for โ€œVisual Affective Skills Animator.โ€ Feed VASA with a single headshot along with a voice sampling and the system can generate realistic video, with associated facial expressions and lip movements that are eerily true to life. VASA is a lab project (for now) but how long will it take before it — or a similarly powerful technology — gets leaked and exploited for mal intent? Could these technologies effectively become a โ€œpoison pillโ€ against truth? While the potential can be frightening, it can also be enlightening.

The Positive Power of Synthetic Media

There are positive potential applications for synthetic media. For instance:
  • Organizations can use synthetic media to extend the reach of their training and sales staff members, creating product demos, explainer videos, webinars and other outputs in seconds.
  • AI chatbots and virtual assistants can use the voices of recognized staff members to deliver messages.
  • Synthetic media can be used to deliver company messages across geographic boundaries and language barriers by translating a presentation by the CEO into multiple languages.
Related:How to Protect Your Enterprise from Deepfake Damage As long as there is transparency behind these efforts, the power of synthetic media can potentially extend limited resources in increasingly creative ways. At the same time, there are steps organizations can take to protect their business from pernicious abuse of technologies like synthetic media.

Combatting the Dangers of Synthetic Media

The gap between rapid tech advancement and human adaptability creates fertile ground for exploitation. This gap is where cybercriminals live, continually adopting and adapting methods to weaken organizational defenses. Despite their efforts, though, there is hope. Organizations can mitigate the risks from technologies like synthetic media by fostering a robust security culture through:
  • Awareness is step one. Employees need to be trained and educated on the latest synthetic threats and how they can be identified.
  • Controlling access to sensitive information can be done through stringent verification processes that might include multi-factor authentication and the use of code words or phrases.
  • Technical controls could be applied as an aid for detecting deepfakes by analyzing inconsistencies in videos or audio-visual mismatches. This could be an excellent application for AI automation.
  • Collaborating with industry peers and reaching out to cybersecurity experts can help companies stay up to date on emerging threats — and the best practices to combat those threats.
  • Advocating for state and federal policies and regulations to combat the misuse of synthetic media.
Related:The Rise of Deepfakes and What They Mean for Security The same AI algorithms that create deepfakes can be applied to defend against them. These systems are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and capable of identifying even very subtle signs that something is amiss in a video or audio clip. AI can be used to help train employees to recognize and respond to these deepfake threats. Will synthetic media poison our ability to discern truth? Arguably, it already has, given the prevalence of deepfakes. The capacity for these manipulations to be exploited by malicious actors is a concerning reality. But just as businesses and governments have successfully addressed various cyber threats by building and nurturing a healthy security culture, they can do the same to combat the dangers posed by synthetic media and deepfakes.
https://www.informationweek.com/cyber-resilience/is-synthetic-media-a-poison-pill-for-truth-

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