A convincing deepfake by the actor is fun, but it has serious implications.
To the casual observer, Tom Cruise’s recent and fake TikTok videos – which generated over 11 million views by Tuesday – playing golf, doing magic tricks and telling jokes about Mikhail Gorbachev seem credible.
But take a closer look and you will see minor imperfections in the recreation of your voice, exaggerated mannerisms, a slightly different body type and other minor anomalies.
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The problem is that, in order to know that Tom Cruise’s videos are not real, most people would have to be notified in advance or get to the video through the deeptomcruise of the TikTok account, where the videos first appeared.
The biggest danger is that it is a small leap from a fake Tom Cruise video to an unflattering video of a former spouse’s revenge. And as deepfake technology improves, the likelihood that more people will believe it increases.
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Deepfakes are described by Microsoft as “photos, videos or audio files manipulated by artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that are difficult to detect.”
In a report, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) states that the underlying deepfake technology “can replace faces, manipulate facial expressions, synthesize faces and synthesize speech”.
The most common deepfakes – a word that combines false computational and deep learning – 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 blackmail in a profound pornography scheme.
One of the most notorious deepfakes has Barack Obama calling Donald Trump “total and complete dives —.” Again, it is very convincing, except that the president’s voice is not exactly correct.
The GAO “Science and Tech Spotlight” goes on to state that deepfakes have positive applications, but are generally not used in this way.
“While deepfakes have benign and legitimate applications in areas such as entertainment and commerce, they are commonly used for exploration,” says GAO.
And the best deepfakes are now realistic enough that sophisticated know-how is needed to identify them.
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“Deepfake technology has reached the point where the authenticity of a video is almost impossible to confirm as genuine,” Brandon Hoffman, director of information security at Netenrich, a cybersecurity company, told Fox News.
“The media do not want to be the unwitting participants in causing widespread panic … With deepfakes, they are in a position where they have to decide, without any technology to help them confirm authenticity, whether or not they see a play with video that could be fake, “said Hoffman.
The TikTok account left no clue as to who was behind the videos, but several reports identified it as the work of a Belgian visual effects specialist who hired a Tom Cruise impersonator. Fox News contacted TikTok for comment.