Commercial endorsement deepfakes fabricate a physician’s image, likeness, or voice to make it appear that they endorse a commercial product or company for financial gain. These most often take the form of endorsements for supplements, weight-loss products, or medical devices. There are numerous documented examples involving well-known physicians.

The likenesses of American physicians have been AI-generated to market vitamins. British television physicians have been impersonated in Facebook advertisements promoting products that claim to cure hypertension and diabetes. AI-generated videos have depicted prominent pediatric academic physicians as recommending menopause supplements, despite their clinical training and expertise lying outside of menopause care. Deepfake physician images and videos were used to promote counterfeit GLP-1 weight loss medications through unregulated online pharmacies. Hundreds of reports have been filed against deepfakes pushing a weight loss supplement called LipoMax.

Across these cases, physician endorsements serve as powerful heuristics that patients frequently use when choosing among health products. Deepfake endorsements falsely leverage years of professional credibility to market interventions that may not have credible clinical evidence.

Engagement farming deepfakes are created primarily to generate views, followers, comments, shares, or advertising revenue. They may take the form of Instagram reels, TikTok videos, YouTube personas, or other short-form social media designed to maximize algorithmic engagement. A 2025 CBS News investigation identified more than 100 videos across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube featuring fictitious or impersonated physicians, with some videos receiving millions of views.

The objective of this variant of deepfake is to create a scalable, recognizable medical persona that is capable of producing large volumes of attention-generating content across languages and platforms. This exploits the credibility and familiarity associated with physicians, while emphasizing provocative or sensational topics that encourage users to comment and share. The accumulated audience itself generates revenue through views and advertisement clicks, affiliate income, or downstream product sponsorship opportunities. While these deepfakes do not necessarily deceive patients into particular transactions, they manufacture attention at scale by leveraging false medical authority.

Medical misinformation deepfakes are created primarily to present false medical claims in a legitimate, authoritative way to influence people’s health beliefs or behavior. They often combine emotionally persuasive narratives with persecutory or conspiratorial themes; for example, they may suggest that governments or pharmaceutical companies are concealing cures for cancer and chronic conditions, promote miracle interventions, or encourage viewers to abandon established therapies in favor of unproven alternatives. AI-generated physicians may also present entirely fabricated medical claims or findings as established fact. More insidiously, this content may fabricate scientific studies in ways that appear authentic by referencing real journals, plausible volume and issue numbers, and legitimate institutional affiliations; this creates the illusion of evidence-based medicine.

Fraudulent phishing deepfakes involve using an AI-generated physician to deceive individuals into disclosing protected health information (PHI), financial information (eg, social security number, insurance number), or other sensitive data for downstream exploitation and monetary gain. Rather than merely promoting products, bad actors may increasingly use convincing AI-generated physician impersonations to facilitate scams, including fraudulent requests for payment for nonexistent medical services or medication purchases through illegitimate online pharmacies. These schemes may be supported by fabricated physician profiles on websites, messaging platforms, or telehealth services.

Professional communication deepfakes, a theoretical type of future deepfake, could make it appear that a physician is delivering professional, institutional communication—when the individual did not actually create or deliver it—through fabricated continuing medical education (CME) lectures, grand rounds presentations, conference introductions, physician interviews, institutional announcements, or other communications presented as originating from a specific physician. Where authorized synthetic communications involve physicians knowingly permitting reproductions of their likenesses for explicitly disclosed and legitimate professional purposes, this content could create the impression of an authentic physician-delivered communication, even when the physician was not involved. These deepfakes could be used to mislead audiences, falsely confer medical or institutional authority on a message, influence grant or investment decisions, or solicit research funding or donations.

Reputational sabotage deepfakes, another theoretical example, could involve manipulations of a real physician’s likeness or voice to make them speak or appear in a manner that damages a physician’s or institution’s professional reputation. They could depict AI physicians making racist, discriminatory, inappropriate, or otherwise objectionable statements or falsely portray them as engaging in professional misconduct, with the objective of damaging a physician’s standing among patients, colleagues, employers, or institutions. In competitive settings, such deepfakes could be deployed by competitors or malicious actors to undermine a physician’s candidacy for employment or leadership positions or to block professional advancement.