The audio of Keir Starmer was posted on X by a pseudonymous account on Sunday, the opening day of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool.

The account asserted that the clip, viewed more than 1.4 million times, was genuine and that a sound engineer had corroborated its authenticity.

However, Ben Colman, the co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender -- a deepfake detection business -- disputed this assessment when contacted by Recorded Future News.

"We found the audio to be 75 per cent likely manipulated based on a copy of a copy that's been going around (a transcoding). As we don't have the ground truth, we give a probability score (in this case, 75 per cent) and never a definitive score ('this is fake' or 'this is real'), leaning much more towards 'this is likely manipulated' than not," said Colman.

"It is our opinion that the creator of this file added background noise to attempt evasion of detection, but our system accounts for this as well," he said.

Of course, the giveaway was that the audio content made Starmer sound more exciting and emotional rather than the wooden board he is usually understood to be.