Reality Defender CEO Ben Colman’s start-up is developing ways to spot deep fake videos and FaceTime fraud.

"It's probably only a matter of months before we'll start seeing an explosion of deepfake video, face-to-face fraud.  Regarding video calls, especially in high-stakes situations, seeing should not be believing,” he warned.

Coleman said that his outfit is not anti-AI and that 99.999 per cent of use cases are transformational -- for medicine, for productivity, for creativity.

However, he said that in some small edge cases the risks are disproportionately bad.

 Reality Defender's plan for the real-time detector is to start with a plug-in for Zoom that can make active predictions about whether others on a video call are real or AI-powered impersonations. T

The company is currently benchmarking the tool to determine how accurately it discerns actual video participants from fake ones. Unfortunately, it's not something you'll likely be able to try out soon. The new software feature will only be available in beta for some clients.

As Reality Defender works to improve the detection accuracy of its models, Colman says that access to more data is a critical challenge to overcome -- a common refrain from the current batch of AI-focused startups.

He's hopeful more partnerships will fill in these gaps and, without specifics, hints at multiple new deals likely coming next year. After ElevenLabs was tied to a deepfake voice call of US President Joe Biden, the AI audio startup agreed with Reality Defender to mitigate potential misuse.

"We don't ask my 80-year-old mother to flag ransomware in an email. Because she's not a computer science expert," Colman said.

In the future, it's possible real-time video authentication if AI detection continues to improve and shows to be reliably accurate, will be as taken for granted as that malware scanner quietly humming along in the background of your email inbox.