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.