Why Fake Security Signals Make Deepfakes More Dangerous

Zoom’s upcoming avatar feature is being widely misunderstood—and that misunderstanding itself creates a serious security risk. What Zoom plans to launch in early 2025 is not autonomous AI attending meetings on behalf of users. It is a scripted avatar system: users type a message, and a digital likeness delivers it. Essentially, it’s a highly polished teleprompter that looks like you.

To address authenticity concerns, Zoom plans to include a visible watermark or badge indicating that the content is AI-generated. In theory, this is meant to solve the trust problem by helping viewers distinguish between real and synthetic participants.

In practice, it may do the opposite.

A visual badge is just pixels on a screen. Any attacker creating a deepfake video can replicate the same watermark—same font, same placement, same wording. Even if Zoom implements strong backend protections such as cryptographic signing or metadata verification, most users will never check them. They will rely on what they can see.

That is where the danger lies. The visible indicator becomes the de facto security signal, regardless of how robust the underlying system may be. And that signal is trivial to fake.

This creates a false sense of confidence at scale. Users are trained to associate the badge with legitimacy rather than caution. The watermark shifts from being a disclosure mechanism to an authentication proxy—one that attackers can easily copy without breaking any real security controls.

Worse still, it reduces vigilance. When people believe there is a reliable visual cue to identify synthetic media, they stop using secondary verification methods. “It had the badge, so I trusted it” becomes the justification for skipped due diligence.

In effect, a security feature designed to protect users ends up legitimizing deception. In environments already vulnerable to deepfakes and AI-driven fraud, fake security signals may be more dangerous than having no signals at all.