Tom Cruise Deepfake videos gone viral on TikTok and other social media platforms. Deepfake TikTok videos of Tom Cruise were seen by millions within few days.
According to details, three TikTok videos featuring Tom Cruise (Hero of Mission Impossible) went viral on TikTok and Twitter. Millions have watched the videos on TikTok, with many initially wondering if the 58-year-old Mission: Impossible star had joined the video-sharing platform beloved of teenagers. Watch the compilation of Tom Cruise’s recent Deepfake videos, below.
In one of the viral TikTok videos, Tom Cruise looks at the camera. “I’m going to show you some magic,” he says holding up a coin. “It’s the real thing”, the Hollywood actor insists, giving his trademark laugh and making the coin disappear. “It’s all the real thing.” Watch the video, below.
The second video shows Tom Cruise playing Golf and passing remarks with his stunning Laughter. Below You can watch the third Video in which Tom Cruise can be seen telling a not-so-funny joke.
The all three videos, which were posted last week on the social media platform TikTok from an account called @deeptomcruise (Deeptomcruise), have collectively been viewed about 11 million times. The account has garnered more than 342,000 followers and 1 million likes from other users of the social media platform.
The person or people behind @deeptomcruise have not yet been definitely identified, but Cruise impersonator Evan Ferrante told website Mic over the weekend that he believed the videos were the work of an actor named Miles Fisher, who resembles Cruise and has done impressions of him in the past. Several people on social media sites also said they believed Fisher is depicting Cruise in the videos, with his face modified using deepfake technology.
Except the viral TikTok videos of Tom Cruise are not real: they’re “deepfakes”. But what is a “deepfake”, and why are they so worrying?
Deepfake technology first emerged in 2017. It is able to place politicians, celebrities or just any normal person into a video they never participated in, making them say or do things that never happened.
The key tool used in deepfakes is machine learning. A person will feed a computer programme hours of real video footage and images of a person to give the machine an understanding of what that person looks like from different angles and under various lights.
This would then be combined with computer graphics techniques to superimpose a copy of the person on to a stand-in actor, who may also be able to add their own references of how that person should move.
The series of highly realistic fake videos of Tom Cruise have led experts to warn that deepfake technology is advancing much faster than most people are aware of and is set to become a key part of society in the future.
While deepfake videos of this quality are normally done by professionals, many apps now offer basic “face swapping” technology that can fool people for a few seconds if they’re casually scrolling, says @HenryAjder. This has allowed it to be used in cases such as “revenge porn”.
“That for me is a worry. The future will be synthesised, this technology is not going away,” adds @HenryAjder.
Sharing “deepfake” images should be a crime, according to experts who fear that the law is not keeping pace with technology and behaviour online.