The creator of a series of fake Tom Cruise videos that generated over 11 million views on TikTok said he never wanted to deceive people.
But since he did, he hopes that the sudden influx of attention can help bring greater awareness to the continuing evolution of technology that can create incredibly realistic fake videos of people.
“The important thing is that we didn’t want to deceive people at any time,” Chris Ume, 31, the Belgian visual effects artist behind viral deepfakes, said in an interview. “If I can help create awareness, or even work on detection in the future, I would love to.”
Ume created the four videos, in which he appeared to show the Hollywood star playing golf, doing a magic coin trick and falling while telling a story about former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Three of them went viral, attracting attention on TikTok and across the Internet.
And while most people quickly realized that the videos were fake, even the experts were impressed by their quality.
“My first thought was that they are incredibly well made,” said forensic imaging expert Hany Farid, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and specializes in image analysis and misinformation. “They are funny, they are smart.”
But they also offer a warning: the Deepfake technology that has emerged in recent years continues to evolve and improve. And while fake videos have not yet been used effectively in many disinformation campaigns, the danger is growing.
“At first, you could see the potential, but it wasn’t even close to being there,” said Farid. “But it seemed to me that it was a real step, as if we had just taken a big step forward in the development of this technology.”
Cruise did not respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, his impersonator, Miles Fisher, responded to an email from NBC News, but said he did not want to comment further.
Synthetic digital content, also known as deepfake, can include anything from an image or video in which a person or object is visually or audibly manipulated to say and do something that is manufactured. In the case of the @deeptomcruise TikTok account, Ume used a combination of visual effects and editing software to make Fisher look almost identical to the “Mission: Impossible” actor.
Other manipulated videos have gained strength in recent years. A video produced by BuzzFeed alerting the public to deepfake technology featured the realistic depiction of former President Barack Obama of actor Jordan Peele in 2018, which gained more than 8 million views on YouTube, and more recently there have been other videos involving the former governor of California. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Looking at @deeptomcruise TikTok videos, Farid said he found it difficult to spot common discrepancies that have already been detected in other deepfakes – such as flaws around the face, especially when it was partially obscured by a moving hand.
He said he was able to identify inconsistencies, especially around the eyes, although “they were very small”.
“This was very polite,” added Farid. “It was long and in high resolution.”
Although Ume used sophisticated visual effects editing, advances in digital editing through smartphone apps like Reface, Facetune and even Snapchat have made techniques like face changing and image changing more accessible and can cause the possible transformation of deepfakes into weapons , experts say.
However, Matt Groh, research assistant with the Affective Computing group at the MIT Media Lab, said that “there are still many restrictions on what this can do”.
“Our imagination can quickly run wild and just assume that it is really good on all fronts – and maybe one day it can be,” he said. “When you have a bunch of different videos, instead of a single video, you start to see where some of those imperfections are.”
To allay the fears of experts like Farid, Ume said he would like to see regulations that allow responsible use of deepfake technology and that social media networks create labels for this type of content.
The detection software is not good enough now, he said.
“This is obvious because these three videos were not detected by the models,” he said.
Since his videos went viral on TikTok, Ume has released an analysis of the visual effects of how he created them, in an attempt to help educate people about how they are made and how they can be difficult to produce.
“It’s not something you can do at home,” said Ume, who is part of a team of deepfake artists at Deep Voodoo – a visual effects studio set up by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the “South Park” program.
The TikTok videos were so compelling, said Ume, because of his experience, as well as the ability to work with someone like Fisher, who could pass for Cruise as well.
TikTok updated its policy after releasing a statement in August 2020, which prohibits synthetic or manipulated content that “misleads users, distorts the truth of events and damages the subject of the video, other people or society”.
However, TikTok took no action against @deeptomcruise or the videos it posted because it did not go against the community guidelines. The social media platform declined to comment.
While fake Cruise videos are fun and “never intended to cheat,” said Farid, there are “legitimate concerns” about how it could inspire others to create similar manufactured content.
“Think about the implications for national security,” said Faird. “Think about the implications if I create a video of Jeff Bezos saying that profits from Amazon’s shares have fallen 20% – how much can I move the markets? How many billions of dollars before someone finds out it is fake? “