From NPR, All Things Considered
Slick Tom Cruise Deepfakes Signal That Near Flawless Forgeries May Be Here
By Emma Bowman
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.
"This is clearly a new category of deepfake that we have not seen before," said Farid, who researches digital forensics and misinformation.
Hany Farid is Associate Dean and Head of School at the UC Berkeley School of Information.
