How Worried Should You Be About Those Tom Cruise Deepfakes? (vice.com) 81
Are the TikTok deepfake videos of Tom Cruise doing magic and playing golf a threat to global democracy? Not exactly. "[T]he reality is that they took a lot of time, technical expertise, and the skilled performance of a real actor," reports VICE News. "Rather than predicting a dark future of disinformation for the masses, they're simply another example of what can be done with significant time and resources." From the report: The Tom Cruise videos, posted on the @deeptomcruise TikTok account, have been viewed over 11 million times on the app and millions more times on other platforms. The videos were suddenly deleted from the TikTok account on Wednesday morning, shortly after VICE News contacted the people who produced them. They show the fake Cruise playing golf, falling over while telling a story about former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and finally, doing a close-up magic trick with a coin.
There's no question the videos are really good. When scanned through several of the best publicly available deepfake detection tools, they avoided discovery. That led many to claim that a new threshold had been reached in deepfake sophistication, and that social media would soon be overwhelmed with similar videos. But that kind of analysis fails to take into account the amount of time, money, and skill it took to produce these videos.
They are the work of Belgian visual effects artist Chris Ume, who is part of a group known as Deep Voodoo Studio, a team of the world's best deepfake artists assembled by the creators of the hit TV show "South Park," Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The team worked with English actor Peter Serafinowicz to produce a 2020 YouTube show called "Sassy Justice," which featured multiple deepfakes of celebrities and politicians. The Tom Cruise TikTok videos required not only the expertise of Ume and his team but also the cooperation of Miles Fisher, a well-known Tom Cruise impersonator who was behind a viral video in 2019 that purported to show Cruise announcing his candidacy for the 2020 election. Ume has even detailed some of the highly complex and involved technical processes he had to go through to produce previous deepfakes.
There's no question the videos are really good. When scanned through several of the best publicly available deepfake detection tools, they avoided discovery. That led many to claim that a new threshold had been reached in deepfake sophistication, and that social media would soon be overwhelmed with similar videos. But that kind of analysis fails to take into account the amount of time, money, and skill it took to produce these videos.
They are the work of Belgian visual effects artist Chris Ume, who is part of a group known as Deep Voodoo Studio, a team of the world's best deepfake artists assembled by the creators of the hit TV show "South Park," Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The team worked with English actor Peter Serafinowicz to produce a 2020 YouTube show called "Sassy Justice," which featured multiple deepfakes of celebrities and politicians. The Tom Cruise TikTok videos required not only the expertise of Ume and his team but also the cooperation of Miles Fisher, a well-known Tom Cruise impersonator who was behind a viral video in 2019 that purported to show Cruise announcing his candidacy for the 2020 election. Ume has even detailed some of the highly complex and involved technical processes he had to go through to produce previous deepfakes.
It's not as bad as people think (Score:3)
They're a good counter to mass surveillance and a society where everybody carries a HD capable camera in their pocket.
And yet The Mandalorian... (Score:1)
...could not even do a mildly convincing Luke Skywalker with all their high tech computers and editors.
Re: (Score:2)
...could not even do a mildly convincing Luke Skywalker with all their high-tech computers and editors.
The Tom Cruise videos are way better than the Luke Skywalker scenes and Princess Leia in Rogue One, despite having 0.001% of the budget.
Hollywood wastes a lot of money and is terrible and finding and using tech talent.
Re: (Score:2)
finding and using tech talent.
To be fair to Hollyweird, we didn't look for the talent that made the Tom Cruise deepfakes. They found us. (through the power of likes and shares)
Re: (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I for one welcome deepfakes as a technology.
So do I. How else am I going to get Emilia Clarke POV pr0n?
Re: (Score:2)
Try asking her. She seems pretty game.
Sassy Justice (Score:5, Informative)
I think we need to have Sassy Justice figure this one out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Anyone knowing History... (Score:4, Insightful)
.. will know that US intelligence agencies will abuse it.
From the Fake Osama Bin Laden body photos that were shown to members of congress, to the fake Fidel Castro porn movie, to the fake Al Qaeda videos from Texas.
If the technology exists, it will be used to lie to us - as we've been lied to over and over again in the past for political purposes.
Those who don't know History won't get it...
Re: (Score:1)
From the Fake Osama Bin Laden body photos that were shown to members of congress
Who, exactly, showed fake Osama Bin Laden body photos to members of congress? I suspect your claim is what's fake.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/t... [cbsnews.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Anyone knowing History... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Sir, this is a wendys
Re: (Score:2)
In a statement last night, Cuomo added: "I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive or too personal and that some of my comments, given my position, made others feel in ways I never intended." He also asked people not to rush to judgments before the investigation is concludedâ"a courtesy he has seldom shown [twitter.com] when it comes to sexual harassment claims against folks other than him.
For instance, Cuomo immediately called for for [reason.com]
Re: Anyone knowing History... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Posts like yours are even worse than deekfakes. At least with the deepfake it's trivial to show that it is fake in most cases, but to debunk what you just said is a much more labour intensive task.
Re: Anyone knowing History... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Man! you don't even have to make the videos to get some significant fraction of voters to believe lies. A skilled right-wing pundit can spin 50 lies in a day, there's no way even the most well funded intelligence agency can compete with that.
Interesting Quote (Score:5, Insightful)
"Rather than predicting a dark future of disinformation for the masses, they're simply another example of what can be done with significant time and resources."
Well. It's not like those two things are mutually exclusive.
Magnificently stupid logic. (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine reading an article from the silent film era explaining that moving pictures can't be used for propaganda and misinformation because they are just black and white images with no sound.
...and Stupid to Worry (Score:2)
Of course, there is an overlap so really good fakes that take a lot of time and effort to create can fool quick and easy (and cheap) tests but as long as the most rigorous testing always catches the best fakes then we do not have muc
Re: (Score:2)
What happens when we start getting AI in our video compression algorithms?
It greatly worries me (Score:5, Funny)
not drowning, waving (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yep I'll be pleased to see hollywood actors getting phased out. They have brand now but they'll slowly be replaced with virtual brands and these douchenozzles will lose their smug lunch. The studios will undoubtedly pump even more money into the technology, happy to fuck them over.. until the technology is advanced enough that you can remix whole scenes and shit. Maybe by the time we're old teenagers will be pumping out hollywood style epics... most of them will suck but by the numbers alone some of tha
Re: (Score:2)
Hollywood has been moving away from "superstar" actors. No one in the new generation has the same drawing power that Leonardo DiCaprio had, or Dick van Dyke.
Processes improve over time (Score:5, Insightful)
fails to take into account the amount of time, money, and skill it took to produce these videos
Yeah, and? SNES emulators barely ran on my Pentium 200 back in the 1990s, mode 7 (mario kart, etc) did not work at all. Now my cell phone plays super mario kart at 60fps, as well as most playstation games
Also, once you figure out how to do something, by the time you do it 2-3 more times, you can put the steps in a script, and then later parallelize parts of that script. In modern times you don't even need to know what software/versions to install, you just pull down the prebuild "docker" container, and volume-mount in the source video, and volume-mount in a folder with the prepped face images and hit enter
I give it two more years until elementary school kids end up in court for wrongful use of this stuff. It's kind of stunning for the author to blow this off as "too hard".
Maybe a really good example of this is video encoding. Video encoding divx, mp4, mpeg2 etc was a really hard task to do using open source tools in the late 1990s through about 2002 when Handbrake was invented. Handbrake has the exact same workflow as describe above, but it's a GUI app. You just select the video source, pick a preset, for advanced users you can tweak an existing preset or build your own, and then name the output file and push "encode". AFAIK handbrake is still a wildly popular video encode/transcode utility. We're just one "handfake" app away.
Re: (Score:2)
I used to say, "Give me three months and $100,000 and I'll give you a video of Osama Binladdin taking credit for sinking the Titanic." Now it would probably be a couple of grand and a long weekend and an AWS account.
Re: Processes improve over time (Score:2)
You could probably do a first gen deepfake quality video for under a thousand dollars and an afternoon. $10,000 and a weekend for a tom cruise quality, assuming you can find a quality deepfake image cache of the guy already
As with all technology, give it abit more time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Complex CGI used to take teams and server farms. Now hobbyists can generate CGI with impressive results.
High quality deepfakes take a team of specialists now. Give it a few more years and they will be within the realm of hobbyists.
Combine this with the now evident nature of people willing to not only buy into wild conspiracy theories, but to engage deeply in them and evangelize them... it's going to get messy. How long until we see high quality, unprovable deepfakes of political opponents?
Re: (Score:1)
I take the opposite approach, this tech is a gift. Very soon nobody will believe anything any of these "famous" talking heads say since their speeches can so easily be faked. It's not like any of our celebrities, politicians and newsreaders told the truth about much anyway. An entire industry exists to make pretty people rich and famous beyond any measure of their ability or intelligence and that cannot end fast enough. Here we are, finally.
Re: (Score:2)
Video evidence is already problematic in court cases, some lawyers are getting bright enough to ask for watermarking and other forms of verification (fortunately not many yet).
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed talking heads on video tend to pump out trash and bullshit and the people who watch that stuff are too dumb to fact check anything. If they lost all faith in that crap maybe they'll go back to sports and cartoons.
Re: (Score:2)
That's likely the big problem.
What's likely to happen though is that photography starts getting a form of DRM and trust. The camera will contain a private key that can be regenerated at will and will sign every image it writes to the card. The same
Re: (Score:2)
al Qaeda long ago figured out how to strip all metadata and extraneous data from their recordings. They shoot the original video and then play it on an HDTV and record the screen image with an older video camera. Sometimes they even play recordings of distant train whistles or harbor sounds in the background, and sometimes they're filmed in areas with plenty of background noise like nearby freeways or factories. In their case the authentication and trust is that they'd kill anyone they caught passing off
Re: (Score:2)
This won't help with internet videos, because alterations are done rather instantly, either downscaling or whatever method. Then someone grabbing the original video, putting it in their own stream to comment on it, etc.
It may authenticate the original video but that's as far as it goes, and there's also the chance of the key being leaked if a wrong person somehow gets employed.
Also, trust signing only validates the original source, it doesn't help if the content itself is as untrustworthy as QAnon's apophen
Re: (Score:2)
I could see this for security cameras and maybe for some professional rigs but if you think consumer products are going to have these features any time soon you're dreaming. We might get it once it just happens to be built into the ICs they happen to use to make your camera. Besides as soon as someone figures out how to extract a private key from a their camera they'll make tons of deepfakes and nobody is likely to know about the exploit for years.
Re: (Score:2)
> Give it a few more years and they will be within the realm of hobbyists.
> high quality, unprovable deepfakes of political opponents?
Already happened on Dec 18, 2019:
The Deeper Metrics of Christmas, Deep Fake Poem by Impressionist Jim Meskimen [youtube.com]
There is a comparison [youtube.com] video showing the Jim Meskimen on the left and the CG on the right. People deepfaked:
* Jack Nicholson
* Tommy Lee Jones
* Robin Williams
* George Clooney
* Christopher Walken
* Ian McKellen
* Nick Offerman
* Christoph Waltz
* Anthony Hopkins
* John
Five years is a really, really long time away (Score:2)
Time, resources and expertise? (Score:2)
So, a few experts produced this and we should not worry? What about the time, resources and expertise that millionaires/billionaires and nations have access to?
"Nothing to see here move along" yeah right
Re: (Score:2)
Or the computational power available to the average user by 2030.
time, money, and skill (Score:5, Insightful)
Not as worried as David Miscavage is (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine Scientology goons collectively imagining what their enemies can be made to say now.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah but if people know scientology is out for you, all video evidence, real or fabricated: Nah bro it was Scientology deep fakes, they're all hollywood and shit.
Almost everyone is aware of Scientology at this point. This is the problem with being a psychopathic dick, it gets you short term results but if your psycho game slips up for even a short time you might as well move away and get a new job, new friends, etc. When I meet new people I try to get a feel for how many long time friends they have vs t
If Man Were Meant to Fly (Score:2)
I'm not that worried (Score:2)
Tom Cruise videos always come up short in my opinion
Its beautiful, man! (Score:2)
They are only nuclear bombs (Score:2)
It's not like we will ever use them, just keep them in storage for a while.
It doesn't matter how hard it is to produce a video it matters how damaging it could be, no one has used a deepfake to cause a massive disruption... yet. That doesn't remove the possibility under the right set of conditions.
Likewise it doesn't matter if a nuke is used by a state actor or a terrorist, it can cause a lot of damage to certain targets.
Re: They are only nuclear bombs (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Thinking of dog and pony shows, I'm reminded of a member of the House of Lords in the 1970s who was supposedly being blackmailed by video of him having sex with a collie. Now he could just claim it was a 'deepfake' and continue to vote whatever way the highest bidder told him.
Re: They are only nuclear bombs (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not a clue, never watched that program. I remember reading it in my dad's 'Argosy' magazine, mostly because I was around 10 or 11 and had no idea how the hell a human could have sex with a collie.
When on of the editors of the much-missed 'E-Week' magazine went to see 'Return of the King' with his son and watched the CGI work done to create the battle scene for Gondor he lamented, "We will never again be able to firmly declare if any piece of video is real or computer generated."
The studios should be worried (Score:2)
This could portend some interesting stuff....
First off, the studios should be worried. A few years from now (if not sooner) anyone will be able to churn out a full-length movie with deepfaked 'actors' , and all they'll need is a PC and an internet connection.
"Copyright abuse of a face" will give the MPAA or RIAA or whoever another reason to live and collect royalties or fines.
From now on, whether or not you were in fact "caught on video" doing something will automatically be in doubt. "Your Honor, this is a
ummm what? (Score:2)
So wait a minute... the gist here is that you shouldn't worry because it requires significant resources to make fakes like the ones made on tiktok for fun. That makes sense, why would someone with significant resources want to threaten democracy. I mean it isn't like anti-democratic actors like China and Russia have technical sophistication or resources and billions to gain... or even dozens of entities within our own borders for that matter.
Suddenly deleted (Score:2)
Because we cant have the public begin to doubt the product of the MSM.
Today (Score:2)
"[T]he reality is that they took a lot of time, technical expertise, and the skilled performance of a real actor" ...
Something not right with that last link (Score:2)
Dangerous both ways (Score:3)
The perfect Slashdot story (Score:2)
This story has everything Slashdot needs: Time travelers, and a tech angle.
If you're going to come from the past to the future then you don't try to blend into society as a writer for Vice. I kid you not the very first thing I checked was the byline and date of publication thinking that Slashdot picked up a story from 2015 again. Deep fakes do not take expertise. They do not take trained actors. They take a bit of time in the form of computer power, but even that is tiny compared to what it was even a few y
Re: (Score:2)
The body looks nothing like tom cruise and most of the work they've talked about would be irrelevant in a talking head situation. This is not some master work though the face is perfect I'll grant that.
Check out myheritage.com (Score:2)
There you can create a small deepfake video of one of your ancestors, just with a photo.
It's amazing.
Who cares? (Score:2)
It's Tom Cruise's problem, not mine.
the end of political advertising as we know it. (Score:2)
If there's anything that political manipulators have, it's money. With money you buy skill and time.
It's obviously not tom cruise (Score:2)
You can tell by his skinny noodle arms. Tom Cruise has visible biceps.