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Tom Cruise lands on TikTok (with a deepfake)

For a moment everyone believed that too Tom Cruise had landed on TikTok, so much so that the account deeptomcruise in a few days he gained 381 thousand followers and a million likes. But it did not last long, in fact, because then the most attentive users realized that it is a fake: it is the gimmick of an actor – still mysterious – who has exploited deepfake technology to superimpose on his, the face of one of the most famous and acclaimed stars in Hollywood and who, perhaps because of too much success, has just deleted all his posts (online when we started writing this article).

However, a very good actor because of his three mini videos he posted – one where the fake Tom Cruise does magic with a coin, another where he tells an anecdote while in a shop, and another where he plays golf – all of a sudden everything seems perfect. You can see the videos here:

But then, if you think about it better, more than one detail does not add up. The name above all – @deeptomcruise – which is a clear allusion to deepfakes. Furthermore, the Tom Cruise who appears in the videos is younger and taller than the real Tom Cruise and then, doing a frame by frame analysis – as it did The Verge – other imperfections come out. For example, there are inconsistencies with lip synchronization (in addition to the fact that the voice is not exactly identical to that of the actor), and with facial details that suddenly change shape, such as the mouth when in the golf video the actor puts the glasses.

The result is however amazing: “one of the best deepfakes I’ve ever seenSomeone wrote in the comments. But it is precisely the result that makes us think why shows how easily one can pretend to be someone else. A danger, as demonstrated by many deepfakes that contributed to the spread of fake news during Donald Trump’s election campaign, and that have already put several celebrities in serious danger, such as Bella Thorne, unbeknownst to her, became the protagonist of a pornographic video.

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