Campaign “See AI” in Saudi Arabia: Checking digital assets confronts deep-fake fraud

The appearance of a familiar face on a phone screen or hearing a known voice in a call is no longer sufficient proof of a recording's authenticity; this direct warning opened the public awareness campaign “See AI” launched by the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA) and the Communications, Space and Technology Authority, coinciding with the Kingdom's designation of 2026 as the Year of Artificial Intelligence.

The campaign focuses on providing individuals with practical skills to examine digital content before they trust or share it on social platforms. The organizing bodies place the risks of deepfake at the top of the agenda, specifically the spread of misinformation, financial fraud, identity theft, and damage to personal reputation, given that modern generative tools can replicate individuals' facial features and voices with high precision without their knowledge or consent.

We noted in the guidance details that the organizing bodies identified a set of visual and auditory cues to detect manipulated material, including unnatural facial movements, an atypical eye side, irregular lighting or shadows, blurred edges around facial features, as well as mismatched lip movements and speech sounds, or sudden changes in image quality and audio clarity.However, the regulatory bodies stress that the absence of these flaws does not guarantee content safetybecause advanced models can generate digital media that are almost free of obvious flaws, making reliance on individual viewing alone an insufficient verification.

The campaign recommends combining contextual analysis of the publication with the use of specialized technical tools. This includes referring to official accounts and trusted news organizations to compare recordings with their original sources, especially when the content contains sensational claims that aim to provoke rapid emotional reactions. SDAIA also points to the role of software detection systems and digital provenance tools in tracing file pathways and modification history, emphasizing that an automated detection tool does not provide a definitive standalone judgment, but requires continuous cross-checking with approved channels.

The most prominent danger manifests in sudden calls and messages that impersonate acquaintances or coworkers to demand urgent financial transfersThe guidance therefore advises breaking the communication chain and conducting independent verification through a completely separate alternative channel before responding to any request that includes sensitive data or cash payments.

This shift requires an immediate reset of work protocols in organizations and companies across the Gulf, Egypt and the Levant; as synthetic media become more precise, reliance on phone calls or voice messages to convey administrative approvals and financial transfers becomes an explicit operational vulnerability. Risk and corporate communications departments need to translate audit recommendations into mandatory policies that include dual-approval channels and train employees to verify digital provenance, rather than relying solely on trust in raw audio and video.

When encountering any fraudulent content or deep-fake extortion attempts, the guidance calls for documenting the case with screenshots, reporting directly to the relevant platform, and filing an official report of cybercrime through the “Kulna Amn” app or the Ministry of Interior’s dedicated channels.The confrontation has practically shifted from individual skepticism to building an integrated procedural audit systemkeeping pace with the speed of synthetic media and preventing the exploitation of digital trust.