Deepfakes

 Social media platforms such as TikTok are hosting AI-generated deepfake videos of doctors whose words have been manipulated to help sell supplements and spread health misinformation.

The factchecking organisation Full Fact has uncovered hundreds of such videos featuring impersonated versions of doctors and influencers directing viewers to a US-based supplements firm.

The Charlatan
Franz van Mieris the elder (1635-1681)
Photo Credit:  City of London Corporation [CC BY-NC] 

All the deepfakes involve real footage of a healthcare expert taken from the internet. However, the pictures have been reworked using AI so that the speakers are encouraging women going through menopause to buy products such as probiotics and Himalayan shilajit...

"This is certainly a sinister and worrying new tactic," said Leo Benedictus, the Full Fact factchecker who undertook its investigation, which it published yesterday.

Prof David Taylor-Robinson, an expert in health inequalities at Liverpool University, is among the victims of this deception. He was shocked to find in August that TikTok was hosting 14 separate doctored videos of him from an account with the handle@better_healthy_life. Despite him being a specialist in children's health, in one of the videos the fake version of him was talking about an an alleged menopause side-effect called "thermometer leg".

In that video the cloned Taylor-Robinson recommended that women in menopause should visit Wellness Nest and buy what he called a natural probiotic featuring " 10 science-backed plant extracts, including turmeric, black cohosh, DIM [and] moringa, specifically chosen to tackle menopausal symptoms.

Taylor-Robinson was alerted by a colleague to his likeness being used. "It was really confusing to begin with and all quite surreal. I did become more and more irritated at the idea of people selling products off the back of my work and the health misinformation involved."...

TikTok took down the videos six weeks after he complained. "Initially they said some of the videos violated their guidelines but some were fine. That was absurd- and weird - because I was in all of them and they were all deepfakes. It was a faff to get them taken down, he added...

(Dennis Campbell, The Guardian, 2025)

A disturbing turn of events and one which we will all have to come to terms with because this problem is not going to disappear. Spreading health, personal, political misinformation can now be done so easily and so realistically and with the "apparent" backing of experts in any field of knowledge.