Alarmingly realistic Tom Cruise deepfakes are taking over TikTok

Tom Cruise is going big on TikTok. The 58-year-old Mission: Impossible and Top Gun megastar can be seen golfing, doing kooky magic tricks and telling jokes about Gorbachev in an upmarket clothing store.

Except, it’s not him. Or not quite: the videos, posted on the social media site by a user called @deeptomcruise, are deepfakes. These are videos manipulated by AI to mimic celebrities and public figures – so you can present Nancy Pelosi as senile and slurring her speech, as Trump’s followers did in 2019. Or show Tom Cruise making a coin vanish, as one of these videos does.

The difference, though, is @deeptomcruise’s deepfakes are chillingly authentic. It helps perhaps that has always been something a little rubbery and mask-like about Cruise’s perfect looks. But from the intense stare, to the maniacal laugh and the sense of pent-up psychopathy, they capture the actor’s mannerisms well.

They are a few giveaways: the person portraying Cruise is clearly taller than the star’s 1.7m. And the lighting, especially around the eyes, is too harsh. But the videos, which first began to appear on 25 February, are some of the most convincing deepfakes yet showcased.

Photographer Lauren White commented on the videos: “Deep fakes are getting scary good and taking over TikTok. Every public figure should just be on there with a verified account – even if they don’t want to make content – to make it easier to identify their fakes.”

Deepfakes are not new. They were first discussed on Reddit in 2017. The name comes from the conjunction of “deep learning” (otherwise known as “machine learning”) and, well, “fake”. It works by swapping one person’s face onto the body of another – hence why Cruise appears taller in the @deeptomcruise videos.

But the clever part comes with the application of AI: deepfakes use facial recognition software and two sets of AI called variational auto-encoders (VAEs). One VAE is trained on images of the subject’s face, the other on a wide variety of faces in different lighting conditions. By combining both VAEs, a programmer is able to simulate their chosen subject moving naturally through the world.

At least, that’s the theory. In reality, most deepfakes look obviously cobbled-together, in a similar manner to the de-ageing CGI that drew so much criticism in films like Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film The Irishman. The brain is adept at recognising when faces are almost, but not quite, human – a phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley effect.

But these new videos show how far deepfake technology has come. They are far more convincing, for instance, than a 2019 viral video which showed Bill Hader slowly morphing into Tom Cruise during a 2008 David Letterman appearance.

Film stars bank on their looks, their physical presence. If these can be faked so easily, then it raises troubling ethical and legal questions. Yet given how torrid conditions on the set of new Mission: Impossible film have become, perhaps Cruise might wish he could deepfake his appearance in after all.