Slick Tom Cruise Deepfakes Signal That Near Flawless Forgeries May Be Here

By:  NPR

March 11, 2021

 

In a crop of viral videos featuring Tom Cruise, it’s not the actor’s magic trick nor his joke-telling that’s deceptive — but the fact that it’s not actually Tom Cruise at all.

 

The videos, uploaded to TikTok in recent weeks by the account @deeptomcruise, have raised new fears over the proliferation of believable deepfakes — the nickname for media generated by artificial intelligence technology showing phony events that often seem realistic enough to dupe an audience.

 

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told NPR’s All Things Considered that the Cruise videos demonstrate a step up in the technology’s evolving sophistication.

 

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