Sunrise's Kochie 'cloned' in 'frightening' video: ‘Extraordinary’

He’s been targeted by scammers and now Sunrise’s David Koch has been ‘cloned’.

Weekend Sunrise host Matt Doran spent seven days delving into the advancements of AI, creating a digital version of 67-year-old Sunrise presenter Kochie.

The astonishing results have left people online gobsmacked, with one person calling the deepfake ‘frightening’.

“It’s Kochie… but not as you know him,” Sunrise captioned the video, which they posted to the show Instagram page.

Matt Doran can be seen introducing digital Kochie to the audience in the clip, saying: “I’ve cloned you, David.

“You stay right there, because what I’m going to do is saunter over here and have a chat to your clone.”

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While the first video was clearly a fake, with Kochie sounding American, Matt then used samples of Kochie’s real voice to see if he could mimic how the real host sounds.

The results were pretty amazing, with the Matt conducting a full-blown interview with fake Kochie, who answered a series of questions around topics like the cost of living crisis and his secrets to ageing.

“Your mouth moves as if you really are saying the words,” Kochie said afterwards.

Matt replied: “It’s extraordinary. You do need a lot of content to actually replicate the voice.

“It took a couple of hours of audio for us to get there - but that technology is improving rapidly.”

People took to the show page to express their shock, with one person saying: “This is frightening and poor Kochie has been targeted so many times.”

“This is so scary,” another person commented.

Kochie victim of death hoax

It comes after Kochie was targeted by scammers using his image and claiming he has died in order to scam people out of thousands of dollars.

The 67-year-old took to Twitter after a post by user @kimberly_ramrez claiming he had died went viral.

The post read: "Although saying goodbye is never easy, we take comfort in knowing that Kochie lived a full and meaningful life, leaving behind a legacy of kindness, warmth and compassion."

Kochie re-tweeted a photo of the tweet, writing, "Just for clarity, I’m alive and well and enjoying @AFL #gatherround in Adelaide with all my family. This stuff is really giving me the sh#ts."

The tweet from Kimberly Ramirez's account appeared to be an advertisement to scam users into signing up for a cryptocurrency service in return for a finder's fee, Crikey reports.

Kimberley, whose account was hacked, told the publication via email, "I had no idea this was happening. I had deleted the app off my phone for a while and forgot about it."

The New York-based woman revealed that she received a login attempt email saying someone in Lake Forest, Illinois was trying to access her account. They then changed her email and started advertising their pose on Twitter using her account.

"This a**hole left me a debt of over $1k on ads," she added.

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