A compelling deep play by the actor is entertaining, but has serious implications.
To the casual observer, recent, deeply falsified videos of Tom Cruise on TikTok – which has been viewed more than 11 million times since Tuesday – make golf, magic tricks and jokes about Mikhail Gorbachev seem credible.
But look closer and you can see small imperfections in the relaxation of his voice, exaggerated manners, a slightly different physique and other small deviations.
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The problem is that, knowing that the Tom Cruise videos are not real, most people had to tell in advance or arrived at the video via the TikTok account deeptomcruise, where the videos first appear.
The bigger danger is: it’s a small leap from a deep forgery of Tom Cruise to an unflattering revenge video of a former spouse. And as deep technology advances, so does the likelihood that more people will believe it.
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Deepfakes is described by Microsoft as “photos, videos or audio files that are manipulated by artificial intelligence (AI) in hard-to-perceive ways.”
In a report, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that the underlying technology of deepfakes can “replace faces, manipulate facial expressions, synthesize faces and synthesize speech.”
The most common deepfakes – a word that combines calculation depth and falsehood – replace the real person in a video with someone else. And they can be used very effectively to make it look like someone, usually a famous person, is saying and doing something they never said or did. Or used as extortion in a profound pornography scheme.
One of the most notorious deep-seated barack Obama called Donald Trump a “total and complete decline —.” Again, this is pretty convincing, except that the president’s vote is not exactly spot on.
The GAO “Science and Tech Spotlight” further says that deepfakes do have positive applications, but that they are not usually used that way.
“Although deep-fakes have approved and legal applications in areas such as entertainment and commerce, they are widely used for exploitation,” the GAO said.
And the best deeps are now realistic enough to magnify advanced expertise to spot one.
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“Deepfake technology has reached the point where the authenticity of a video is almost impossible to verify as genuine,” Brandon Hoffman, chief information security officer at Netenrich, a cybersecurity company, told Fox News.
“Media-media do not want to be the unconscious participants to cause widespread panic … With theft they are in a position where they have to decide, without any technology to help them confirm the authenticity, or they are a piece with a video wants to run false, ”Hoffman said.
The TikTok account left no clues as to who was behind the videos, but several reports identified it as the work of a Belgian visual effects expert who hired a Tom Cruise impersonator. Fox News contacted TikTok for comment.