TAOISEACH LEO VARADKAR said he was “suspicious immediately” during a prank video call by two Russian comedians but needed to “play along for a little while”.
It emerged yesterday that the Taoiseach was the latest politician to fall victim to a prank by a Russian duo who pose as diplomats in order to coax world leaders into gaffes.
In a 13-minute clip, posted to alternative media website ‘Rumble’ – a platform that has light restrictions to what a person can say or do – the Taoiseach answers questions on a number of issues including migration, a United Ireland, the possibility of Ireland joining NATO and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Taoiseach took part in the virtual meeting with the understanding that it was with a representative of the African Union Commission.
“It happened a couple of months ago and I think there were seven or eight Prime Ministers or senior figures around Europe who found themselves in the same boat as me,” the Taoiseach told reporters at a roundtable interview in Dublin.
“It’s not as it appears, by the way, on their video. There were no Russians. They used an AI image of someone who works with the African Union.
“So what they’ve done is they’ve over dubbed it with these Russian voices. They’ve doctored it and edited it.
“So what you’re seeing on that site is not actually what happened. So it is fake in that sense,” he said.
“But the way they managed to secure the video call was by impersonating somebody who works for the African Union and at the outset of the call because they used the image of the person and their voice we believed it was genuine.
“But it very quickly became very obvious that there was something afoot and there was something wrong and as you probably know from it I ended the call,” Varadkar said.
He added: “But I kind of needed to play along for a little while before assuming that it was a suspect call but I think you’ll note from my answers to the questions I was very careful in my answers because I was suspicious immediately and then it just became increasingly obvious through the course of the conversation that it was fake.”
The Taoiseach said because of the hoax, procedures now need to be changed in relation to video calls.
“It is the new world of artificial intelligence. It is actually really easy now to produce a fake image of somebody on a screen and that fake image can have the persons voice and mannerisms.
“So in some ways now, I think one of the strange consequences of things like AI is that people are going to want to see things for themselves a bit more.
“People are going to be much less trusting of photographs and video and images that they see on screens and are going to want to be able to hear with their own ears and see with their own eyes.
“So we’ll have to have very strict security protocols around this in the future, which we do, but I do think in general because of the advancements in technology a lot more important things are going to have to happen in person than we might have thought during the pandemic we’re going to move to a virtual world,” he said.
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