Narayana Murthy's deepfake video promises people Rs 2.5 lakh in a day

Two new deepfake videos featuring Infosys founder Narayana Murthy, which are being shared on social media, are purportedly promoting a so-called investing platform called 'Quantum AI', claiming that the user of this new tech will be able to earn $3,000 (around Rs 2.5 lakh) on the first working day.

One of the videos showed a morphed version of Murthy claiming to be working on a Quantum AI project with tech billionaire Elon Musk. "Today, I want to present our new project together with Elon Musk. Quantum AI is the world’s first quantum computing software developed by my team and Elon’s team with a 94 per cent success rate,” the morphed voice says.

The deepfake video was shared on Facebook, but has now apparently been deleted. In the clip, Murthy’s lip movements seem clearly out of sync with the audio — one of the strongest indicators of deepfake videos.

The original video is of Murthy speaking at the Moneycontrol Startup Conclave held on 7 July in Bengaluru.

On 8 November, the first deepfake video with a morphed voice of Murthy speaking about Quantum AI was shared on Facebook. Again, Murthy's English accent differs from the one in the deepfake video. This video was a morphed version of Murthy speaking at the Mindrush event hosted by Business Today on 24 June 2022.

Meanwhile, Zerodha co-founder and CEO Nithin Kamath has posted a video showing his own deepfake, which was convincing enough to fool users into believing it was Kamath himself. He said the aim was to highlight the growing threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI).

In the video, Kamath’s deepfake speaks about the difficulty in verifying customer identities as digitisation takes centre stage.