As any habitual social media user, King's College London professor Alan Read did not pay much heed to the occasional deepfakes that would flash up on his feed. Sometimes he would report them, other times he would simply scroll past. Until one day, an obscure account tagged him in a video featuring his own face. In it, a synthetic voice nearly identical to that of Dr Read went on a politicised tirade against French President Emmanuel Macron, berating him and other Western leaders as "aboard the