If you wanted another reason to fear the future, deepfakes are getting shockingly real, and a TikTok account featuring a fake Tom Cruise is turning plenty of heads.
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Go to the @deeptomcruise page on TikTok, and you’ll see what appears to be the famed actor doing a magic trick with a coin, falling while shopping at a men’s clothing store, and playing golf.
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While there are some giveaways in the video that it’s not really Cruise, including the body double appearing to be taller than Cruise’s alleged 5’7ish”, you have to look really closely to depict something’s off. (And if you don’t come into the viewing experience knowing it’s a deepfake, you might be less able to tell it’s a deepfake.)
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As The Daily Beast noted in its coverage, “In each of the three videos, Cruise delivers his signature maniacal laugh—you know, the one he repeatedly unleashed in that batty Scientology recruitment video years back—before launching into some sort of bit, and in all of them, it looks just like Cruise. Only it’s not Cruise.”
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The story goes on to comment on the deepfake model looking younger than Cruise’s current 58. “Also, his voice is hollow and scratchy,” the article observes, “a la that scene in Face/Off where John Travolta-as-Nicolas Cage is trying to adjust his vocals to that Cage-ian timbre.”
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“Still, the Cruise TikToks managed to bewilder and horrify a number of people,” it observed. “As photographer Lauren White wrote, ‘Deep fakes are getting scary good and taking over TikTok. Every public figure should just be on there with a verified account—even if they don’t want to make content—to make it easier to identify their fakes.'”
And here’s the tweet she sent.
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There’s good news, though: As someone wrote in reply, “One of these fake Tom Cruise deepfakes was uploaded to https://counter.social a couple of hours ago and our DeepFake Detector AI flagged it and notified our users.”
Another person noted, “It only works by feeding an AI with a lot, and I mean a lot of hours of footage, that’s why you only see actors and politicians,” adding that it’s “nothing to be scared for the average folk.”
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Still, though, there’s one possible byproduct that one person predicted: Its misuse by right-wingers.
“Republicans will start claiming their embarrassing, corrupt recordings were deep fakes. It’s literally right around the corner. Another misinformation pitfall to contend with. Fox will start airing deep fakes of Democrats as real news, etc. Get ready.”
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*First Published: March 1, 2021, 8:54 am
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