AI has given us some hilarious spoof videos, but how do we know what is real?

A spoof video, featuring a Chinook helicopter rescuing a stricken narrowboat from the collapsed canal in Whitchurch, accompanied  by the theme music from the hit 1980s adventure series, has became a recent viral sensation.

Other AI-generated images include a man dressed only in bermuda shorts ice-skating atop the Pontcysyllte aqueduct, Sir Kier Starmer nursing a weasel, and a hippopotamus swimming up the cut. 

The videos have all been shown on the satirical Facebook page Canal Boats, and are really good fun and completely harmless.

They are also easy to do. We created our own version of the helicopter rescue in seconds on ChatGPT. For good measure we asked it to look at how the Wrekin would look with high rise flats on – and what an M6 Grand Prix through the West Midlands would look like.

But while AI can be great entertainment,  this all poses a more serious question – in today's multi-media age, how can we possibly know what is real and what is AI generated?

Back in January 2024, a voice recording emerged of then US president Joe Biden telling people not to support him in the forthcoming New Hampshire primary election, but to 'save their vote' for the General Election the following November. The message, of course was fake, and voting in the primary would not prevent anybody from voting the following autumn. And while few people actually believed it, it demonstrated how realistic these 'deepfakes' were becoming. Ironically, the last months of Biden's presidency were dogged with conspiracy theories that many of his speeches were 'deepfake' videos.

For Des Healey, the effects were much more keenly felt. In August 2023, Mr Healey, a self-employed kitchen fitter had been looking for ways to make a bit of extra money over the quiet period in the run-up to Christmas. and was attracted to a crypto-currency investment scheme being promoted on social media by television money expert Martin Lewis and tech billionaire Elon Musk.