Nottingham Gallery Owner Allegedly Defrauded by Deepfake Impersonating Pierce Brosnan, Leading to Business Closure

February 8, 2025

Gallery owner Simone Simms suffered allegedly from a deepfake impersonating actor Pierce Brosnan, leading her to believe she was in contact with the real person. She arranged an art exhibition and sold £20,000 in tickets based on this false belief. The event's cancellation due to Brosnan's denial of involvement resulted in reputational and financial harm, ultimately leading to the gallery closure in August 2024. This incident highlights the importance of safe and secure AI practices, especially in regards to deepfakes that can cause harm prevention. For those interested in shaping trustworthy AI governance, join us at HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) to help establish guardrails for AI.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers-impersonating-pierce-brosnan, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
simone-simms, long-eaton-gallery, long-eaton-gallery-customers, nottingham-art-community

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/923

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.