Advanced deepfakes of Tom Cruise are going viral on TikTok, with the account deeptomcruise amassing 200K+ followers in a few days
FOR THE LOVE OF XENU — Be afraid. Be very afraid. — Three days ago, a TikTok account going by @deeptomcruise began posting video clips …
The Daily BeastMarlow Stern
Context & Ripple Effects
The viral @deeptomcruise account is the moment hobbyist deepfaking hit mainstream scale. Two years earlier an author showed how little it takes to fake a convincing face — a two-week project built on Faceswap for about $552 — and by 2020 creators were publishing YouTube tutorials so others could replicate the trick, turning deepfake memes into an open skill rather than a lab capability.
What makes this clip different is reach and ambiguity: millions see a flawless synthetic Cruise on TikTok's recommendation feed, and per the reporting, TikTok says 14 of the implicated accounts do not violate its rules. Within months, the person behind these videos had spun the technique into Metaphysic, a company selling deepfake tech for advertising and film restoration — the viral stunt doubling as a product demo.
First-order effects
Tom Cruise's likeness is being replicated at scale without his consent or involvement, while TikTok's own review finds the accounts largely within its rules — leaving the actor no enforcement path on the platform where the fakes spread.
Second-order effects
Platforms get forced to write synthetic-media policy reactively instead of proactively; by 2023, a deepfake scam ad using MrBeast's likeness pushed the question of whether social networks are 'ready' for AI fakes into the open, showing celebrity confusion quickly graduating into fraud.
Third-order effects
If convincing fakes keep outrunning detection, researchers' earlier warning holds: the technology hands cover to anyone dismissing real footage as fabricated, and with high-stakes elections approaching, experts warn a single well-timed deepfake disinformation drop could have calamitous impact — the same gap DARPA was funding detection research against back in 2019 (as CNN reported then).
The trend: Synthetic celebrity likenesses are maturing from hobbyist memes into a commercial tool and a fraud-and-disinformation vector faster than platform policies can define what counts as a violation.
See this video of Tom Cruise? Well, it's not Tom Cruise. It's AI generated synthetic media that portrays Tom Cruise onto a TikTok user using Deepfakes. Seeing is no longer believing. https://twitter.com/...
The threat-vector for deep fakes is not in copy-pasting celebrities (which, easily disavowed and black-labeled) But in creating videos of the believable and sympathetic (and artificial) masses, to be amplified by a credulous media and latched onto by craven politicians. https://t…
We're probably 12 months away from deep fakes being indistinguishable from real videos, and after that I have no idea what happens. https://twitter.com/...
I remember the tens of articles on voice-based social engineering attacks (someone calling pretending to be the CEO asking for an urgent bank transfer, say). Imagine with video-based social engineering. Especially without a built-in way to verify who's joining that Zoom meeting. …
Great news for avatar providers like @genies who would be in a position to offer celebrity clients private key custody as a way to authenticate online content? 🤔 https://twitter.com/...
Tweeting this just in case I'm right: Those Tom Cruise deepfakes are real Tom Cruise and it's a publicity stunt for... something. https://twitter.com/...
Good news for sex workers- they can claim everything is a DeepFake. I think if any decent pornographic ones of me were released I'd use chaff countermeasures and release thousands of low-quality ones via bot to obfuscate plausible ones in search results. https://twitter.com/...
Impressive deep fake: the law & society is going to have to catch up to allow people to easily stop these sorts of videos from being made and shared https://twitter.com/...
So, how are we all feeling about #deepfakes becoming more and more of an everyday reality? Considering that people can't even tell the difference between journalism and conspiracies...🤔 “Shockingly Real Tom Cruise Deepfakes Are Invading TikTok” https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ...
The Tom Cruise #DeepFakes demonstrate what will become a commonplace technique in which human actors play the part but are skinned to look like someone else. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ... #AvatarLand #DeepTomCruise
It's the voice acting, and the switching from grin to not-grin, that's so impressive: the deepfakery is excellent but so is all the rest. https://twitter.com/...
when i tried @sensityai's deepfake detector on still images, it was right every time (i'm told in tests it's about 98% accurate). but the impressive tom cruise deepfakes on tiktok? it couldn't catch any when @JaneLytv ran them through. if that doesn't make you nervous, it should.…
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. Here's Tom Cruise: https://twitter.com/...
Despite being done with an actor/impersonator one can still tell this is fake but we're fast approaching the point where most can be fooled, even without a huge budget behind it. https://twitter.com/...
If you needed confirmation that deepfakes are no longer Mission: Impossible, check out this one depicting Tom Cruise. #AI H/T @morgfair https://twitter.com/...
Video evidence is now dead. It can no longer be trusted. Congrats to the govt agencies everywhere on not adequately preparing for this very foreseeable eventuality which many of us have been trying to warn about. https://twitter.com/...
maybe deepfakes will get so real that photo/video won't mean anything and we'll just have to revert back to seeing things with our own eyes to believe them https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ...
Have a look at this to convince yourself that the era of video-being-evidence is over. If your boss tell you to transfer $10m during the video-call, do not. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ...
The “deeptomcruise” TikTok account has 138,000 followers: https://www.tiktok.com/.... The lack of any ethical rules addressing how this tech gets abused, mostly to harass women, is a huge problem: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... / https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://t…