27 July 2026 · Andrew Grill in conversation with John Darvall, BBC Radio Bristol
AI can now write your news, clone your voice and quietly redraw the photo behind you on a video call. Andrew Grill, The Actionable Futurist®, joined BBC Radio Bristol to answer the question listeners keep asking: how do you tell what’s real?
His answer was blunt. You can’t, not reliably, not anymore, not even Andrew. So instead of trying to spot the fake, he shared two habits that don’t depend on spotting anything at all:
Set a family password. Agree a word or phrase with the people who matter to you, in person, never online. If a call feels off, ask for it.
Use the callback rule. If something sounds even slightly wrong, hang up and ring back on a number you already trust.
On air, Andrew also walked through a test he’d run himself: LinkedIn correctly flagged an AI-generated image he’d uploaded and watermarked it automatically. He then uploaded a plain screenshot of the same image, and the watermark vanished. Even the platforms built to catch AI content, he told listeners, can be beaten with something as simple as a screenshot.
“The honest answer is you can’t spot an AI fake reliably anymore, because the technology is now so good. What you can do is build a habit that doesn’t depend on spotting anything.” — Andrew Grill
Andrew was clear that the same technology cuts both ways. Voice replacement and image editing have real, useful applications; it’s the criminals repurposing them for scams that his listeners need to be ready for.
Andrew Grill is a regular AI contributor to BBC Radio Bristol. This segment builds on the family-password and verification framework from his book Digitally Curious (Wiley, 2024).
