Tom Cruise’s Deepfake Videos Show Tech’s Threat to Society is Real

New deepfake videos of actor Tom Cruise have made their way to TikTok under the handle @deeptomcruise, and they look real. They’re so realistic, in fact, you might not even know they’re computer generated if you hadn’t been alerted by the account handle. And they were made using little more than sample footage from Cruise and deepfake technology which is becoming easier for everyone to use.

Just two years ago, it would have been easy to tell the difference between an actual video and someone’s AI-generated video. But the technology is advancing so rapidly that we have reached a point of vanishing speed, and it is obvious that deepfakery will not be used just for innocent purposes, like animating images of your former parents.

Seeing is believing – In a series of tweetsSocialProof Security CEO Rachel Tobac warns that deepfakes like @deeptomcruise threaten to further erode public trust in a world where media literacy is poor and people already can’t agree on what is true or false. Like the black and gold dress, where one person may notice that Tom Cruise’s videos are being synthesized, another may not know the signs of a fake and swear from top to bottom that they are real.

“Just because you feel you can personally tell the difference between synthetic and genuine media doesn’t mean we’re good to go,” she says. “What the general public thinks matters.”

Deepfakes are particularly dangerous as the video is widely viewed as indisputable proof. A prominent individual could be deeply instigated into committing a hate crime, or a person who has legitimately committed an unjust act could use deepfakes to fabricate an alibi.

AI versus AI – As deepfakes have improved, companies including Microsoft have built tools that can detect them, generating trust scores based on signals that a piece of content is being manipulated, such as spawning. subtle fading or grayscale elements invisible to the naked eye. And in fact, a website called CounterSocial was able to detect Tom Cruise’s videos as fake when executed through its own artificial intelligence algorithm.

But TikTok is where the videos are hosted, and this app doesn’t have any kind of built-in deepfake detector. The problem with retroactive detection is that by the time false information has been reported, it may be too late to reverse the damage. Microsoft is attempting to resolve this problem with a digital signature tool. The idea is that content creators would sign a video’s metadata while encoding it, and a tool that users install in their browsers would then alert them if the metadata has been altered in some way. It is still an experimental concept.

Label time – Tobac says apps like TikTok must have built-in deepfake detection and tagging tools. And by then, Cruise and others will have to verify themselves on these social media just to come out in front of fakes.

Even after adding these layers of detection to apps like TikTok, deepfake tech will continue to improve, which likely means constant cat and mouse play from here on out. Microsoft has admitted that even its detection technology will need to be constantly updated. It is simply the nature of technology.