Will the real Tom Cruise please stand up?
March 9, 2021 6:12 AM   Subscribe

Tom Cruise Isn’t On TikTok: It’s a Shockingly-Realistic DeepfakePetaPixel explains how VFX/AI artist Chris Ume, creator of the real TikTok deeptomcruise account, faked it. Hint: it helps to have a Tom Cruise impersonator.
posted by cenoxo (36 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
It never looked like a deepfake to me. I didn't see any flicker or digital artifacts. No moments where the face jumped when it changed angles, no weird dolphin-smooth skin. Just a guy that looked like Tom Cruise. It was weird to me that everyone reported on it a as a deepfake without any scrutiny.

I misunderstood what stunt meant in the original article. So this was a very well-made deep fake. (That started with an impersonator.)
posted by little onion at 6:20 AM on March 9, 2021


You can easily tell it is not Tom Cruise because the fake Tom Cruise does not spend an absurd portion of the video running.
posted by srboisvert at 6:31 AM on March 9, 2021 [6 favorites]


I always wonder about the logic of a goal like "draw attention to deepfakes and petition for their regulation" by creating one. Kind of like saying "I'm out to prove that banks should be made secure against theft" by going out and robbing a bunch of banks.
posted by rikschell at 6:59 AM on March 9, 2021 [2 favorites]


When this account first popped up on my fyp I watched it like 20 times trying to figure out if it was real. I had to do some digging to discover it was fake. It's pretty amazing.
posted by Lutoslawski at 7:01 AM on March 9, 2021


The creator of the deeptomcruise account today revealed that it was a stunt. Masterminded by visual effects expert Chris Ume, the goal was to draw attention to deepfakes and petition for their regulation.

I'm pretty sure the goal was something else. Yeah.
posted by Beholder at 7:13 AM on March 9, 2021


I've never seen a deepfake where the lips moved anywhere near realistically enough to seem authentic (at least not one with a decently high resolution). The mouth in all of these was so jarringly off! If it's not a problem with the timing, it's a weird feeling that the mouth is floating over the rest of the face, or a lighting issue with the inside of the mouth, or just a horrible sense that something is terribly wrong. Although, come to think of it, that last one might just be the effect Tom Cruise"s face has on me in general.

I'm sure this is a temporary limitation of the technology, but there's always something about the mouth movement that leaves me feeling vaguely seasick.
posted by wakannai at 7:22 AM on March 9, 2021 [2 favorites]


Will the real Tom Cruise please stand up?

"I am standing up!" the Hollywood shortarse responded.
posted by Paul Slade at 7:26 AM on March 9, 2021 [8 favorites]


I was completely fooled, but then again, the real Tom Cruise has always seemed kind of uncanny valley to me.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:28 AM on March 9, 2021 [11 favorites]


scripting this would be more like "see here Tom Cruise, imagine what we could do to your career"

or anyone's career, life, &c.

I guess I will also get to live in a world where no one takes video seriously because ...

[when that storage facility exploded in Beirut last year someone sent a video of it happening to me via WhatsApp; I watched and said to myself, "well that's some realistic CGI, and funny how that woman in the bride's outfit reacted. It took some effort to finally convince myself that this was something horrible that had actually happened]
posted by chavenet at 7:47 AM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


Would most people have known this was a deepfake, if it didn't come out and say so upfront? Hard to say, after the fact.

I'd love to see Ume collaborate with a well-known actor. Make a couple clips with the real actor. Make a couple with the deepfake. Put them all out there and ask random viewers to pick which ones are real and which are faked. That would be a genuinely interesting and true test of artistry and technology, I think.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:56 AM on March 9, 2021 [3 favorites]


It's a pity they wasted their time on Tom Cruise, maybe the tech works better on people with no soul. The manic tics were a little overplayed.

The impersonator, Miles Fisher, has a youtube channel and a business podcast.
posted by adept256 at 7:58 AM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


what a dismal way to spend your time
posted by thelonius at 8:27 AM on March 9, 2021 [5 favorites]


I was completely fooled, but then again, the real Tom Cruise has always seemed kind of uncanny valley to me.
Its more fascinating to me how poorly it does work, even with an impersonator. Sure, Hollywood or nation-state level investment could correct these things, but even for the self-advertising level of investment for the tiktok there's the moment he flips his hat up and you see the face underneath, or where the impersonator's cheeks bulge beyond the faketomcruise mask, giving a jarring uncanny valley to me.

I wasn't intent on watching it skeptically, and perhaps its just the over-training of my neural network in my youth, but the differences stuck out to a brain which is constantly trying to map experience with mostly only the tools of pattern completion and pattern separation. What will be interesting is when we're trained more on the fake than on the real thing.
posted by rubatan at 8:28 AM on March 9, 2021


I do think one reason a lot of people weren't so fooled is because they have so much experience watching the real Tom. That's not so true for most of the TikTok crowd. I'm older than most on TT and even then the extent of my experience watching Tom Cruise is like Mission Impossible and maybe one other movie. It might be that this works less well with Doja Cat. There's also a sense in which on things like TT, reality can be pretty distorted but we still accept it as being real, because we are so used to watching everything with filters and effects and such. So the default position is to accept, rather than reject, despite any weird glitches.
posted by Lutoslawski at 8:48 AM on March 9, 2021 [2 favorites]


I always wonder about the logic of a goal like "draw attention to deepfakes and petition for their regulation" by creating one

There was a Netflix documentary about the guy who distributed plans for a 3D printed gun. The group promoting that was Defense Distributed, with founder Cody Wilson. His story shows how Cody Wilson did this the right way, highlighting social issues, and challenging authority with a well-calculated provocation.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:51 AM on March 9, 2021


Would most people have known this was a deepfake, if it didn't come out and say so upfront? Hard to say, after the fact.

Some of us would. I yet to see a "deep fake" that didn't make me feel embarrassed for those who even momentarilly thought it was real.

Why is the Uncanny Valley in my brain apparently Grand Canyon-sized and incapable of being fooled by these things? No idea. I'm also incapable of seeing "magic eye" pictures, so I guess that's just how it is.
posted by sideshow at 8:59 AM on March 9, 2021 [2 favorites]


His story shows how Cody Wilson did this the right way, highlighting social issues, and challenging authority with a well-calculated provocation.

Wilson also profited off a Patreon-style crowdfunding site that hosted white supremacists who were toxic enough to have been booted from all the other crowdfunding sites. It got shut down once it got blackballed by payment processors.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:05 AM on March 9, 2021 [2 favorites]


Wilson is also a registered sex offender. But maybe he was just trying to bring attention to human trafficking.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:12 AM on March 9, 2021


am I allowed to brag here? About thirty-three years ago, the end of 1987, I wrote something in a local fanzine about how, given coming evolutions in digital technology, that you'd eventually be able to fake anything. Wayne Gretzky could be pictured mainlining heroin, Ronald Reagan could be shown f***ing a pig. This after a discussion with a tech-head friend who'd been keeping up on r+d in the digital recording realm. "If it can be done with a sound file (it has), it can be done with a picture file, because once you get down to that level, it's all just ones and zeroes." Or words to that effect.

One more reason, I guess, why we all need to get better at being confused.
posted by philip-random at 10:04 AM on March 9, 2021 [2 favorites]


Some of us would. I yet to see a "deep fake" that didn't make me feel embarrassed for those who even momentarilly thought it was real.

From the creator's point of view, I wonder if it takes some of the risk out of being criticized for the work, when you tell your audience they are looking at a fake. Some of us can enjoy the magic show, some can enjoy claiming to see through the trickery. Ume doesn't lose much, either way, but it isn't as much of an artistic risk on his part, either.

Some questions come up, for me. In a world of technological copies, most of us still expect a human being on our screens to be authentic, to be the "real thing". How do we cope with the creeping sense that even people around us may not really be what they are? Even if authenticity is no longer going to be a fair expectation as the technology improves, what did it mean for an actor/politician/celebrity to be "real", in the first place?

Actors play other people or roles — and politicians and other celebrities do as well, to some extent, who are potential targets of deepfakes — so when we look at Tom Cruise, are we watching a performance or the person hiding behind the mask, whether or not it is deepfake footage. Presumably, none or at least very few of us know these people personally, so what we're looking at may just as well be a caricature of a real person, even by that individual themself.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:11 AM on March 9, 2021


I yet to see a "deep fake" that didn't make me feel embarrassed for those who even momentarilly thought it was real.

how do you know you haven't been fooled? I'm pretty sure all deep fakes don't announce themselves. I've also heard that some con men (and women -- confidence artists in general) like it when someone says they can't be fooled. Their whole game after all is to use your confidence against you.
posted by philip-random at 11:01 AM on March 9, 2021


Are we certain that Tom Cruise isn't the guy in the puppet inside of the Nicolas Cage puppet?
posted by loquacious at 11:45 AM on March 9, 2021


I'm old enough i remember back when we were worried that Photoshop had gotten good enough you'd never be able to trust pictures again. And we can't, but we still take pictures and they still have utility.

So having video take the same route to unreliability as still photos doesn't seem all that devistating to me.

The truth is the camera lies and the camera has always lied. Even before Photoshop the camera lied by framing, by the deicision of what to photograph and what not to photograh, by the captions accompanying the photograph.

Take the infamous way the AP captioned photos in the flooding of hurricane Katrina where it described Black people as looting from a grocery store, and white people as "finding" from a grocery store.

The first picture on this link is a prime example of the camera lying via framing and omission. The reporters there chose to photograph a single trash can with a small fire and present it as evidence of widespread chaos and lawlessness during a protest against Trump.

The camera has always lied. Video has always lied. The existence of convincing deepfakes doesn't change anything. You never could trust video. This isn't new, it's just more dramatic.

rikschell As far as robbing banks to bring attention to insecurity, there's people who make money that way. Admittedly they do it by invitation rather than on a whim of their own, but still.
posted by sotonohito at 12:09 PM on March 9, 2021 [3 favorites]


Tom Cruise sometimes looks like he's wearing a Tom Cruise mask.
posted by gottabefunky at 12:42 PM on March 9, 2021 [4 favorites]


I'm old enough i remember back when we were worried that Photoshop had gotten good enough you'd never be able to trust pictures again. And we can't, but we still take pictures and they still have utility.

Yeah, long before the "You can tell by the pixels" meme I used to have a thing and point of pride for spotting manipulated still images or motion CGI because for a long time you really could tell just for looking for signs of antialiasing, blitter/jitter and other tell tales.

In the 90s I was often working with Photoshop and doing image manipulation and retouching for still print work and for a while that plus being a fan of movie effects, miniatures and other practical effects gave me a small edge in detecting digitally manipulated

Now I can't even tell any more and it's super weird. There's so many A-list movies that have pixel perfect CGI now that it's exceedingly difficult to tell what's a "real" practical effect, and there's been so many movies where I thought I was looking at fully CGI sets or mattes that were actually practical miniatures and models.

Bladerunner 2049 is one of these. Farther back, there's a ton of stuff in The Fifth Element that I could have sworn was CGI but was actually practical models and miniatures, especially the cityscape scenes and spacecraft.

And now we have movies and TV shows that are almost entirely shot in green screen composites, motion capture animation and other complex digital composite effects where they don't even build sets or miniatures at all, and there's even more advanced tools coming on line and putting out product.

I can't remember the name of the technique or system off the top of my head but one of the new hot techniques is using extremely high definition video walls and rooms where instead of a green screen or analog/digital matte paintings they're projecting the entire scene in a sort of cyclorama style immersive room with live actors in it and it works a lot better than you would think when it goes to print.

It has the added effect of being able to have live actors and objects in the digital set where, say, a motorcycle or vehicle or set piece will end up with almost perfectly real specular lighting, reflections and other details on the real world actors and eyes so you don't have to go back in and add all that lighting and shadow work digitally.

However, I think it's nearsighted to say that these advanced faked images and video aren't going to have negative consequences on our social and political landscape.

They already have and are. We've already had many incidents where basic yet clever editing has been used in mainstream media to push viewpoints and openly lie about things at events like protests.

We have also been living with the results for several decades or more with deeply manipulated imagery being used in marketing unrealistic, toxic and unhealthy beauty and body image issues particularly with women, and we can see these negative consequences all around us if you're willing to look for them and see them.
posted by loquacious at 1:08 PM on March 9, 2021 [3 favorites]


Some of us would. I yet to see a "deep fake" that didn't make me feel embarrassed for those who even momentarilly thought it was real.

Dude, some of us are watching videos on tiny, dirty phone screens and we're half drunk. Anyway, joke's on you because "real" Tom Cruise was replaced by a robot during the filming of Eyes Wide Shut, one more victim of Kubrick's legendary attention to detail.

row of nested small tags

I'm seriously resisting snarking about typos in a comment that is boasting about observational skills. Unfortunately, pointing out typos leads to a typo infestation in one's own comments.

end row of nested small tags
posted by betweenthebars at 1:36 PM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


rikschell As far as robbing banks to bring attention to insecurity, there's people who make money that way. Admittedly they do it by invitation rather than on a whim of their own, but still.

Pen Testers (Penetration Testers) - there are both digital and physical versions. The physical version is fascinating. You can watch youtube videos on physical pen testing that will result in you never trusting a door ever again.
posted by srboisvert at 1:42 PM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


This tech is still in its infancy.
posted by Wetterschneider at 2:33 PM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


This reminded of me of that video where BIll Hader morphs into Tom Cruise and Seth Rogen while doing his impersonations. You don't even notice, until suddenly you're like "wait, that's Tom Cruise" -- I guess it helps that he has a vaguely Tom-Cruiseish face shape already.

I think Matt and Trey used impersonators for their "Sassy Justice" deepfakes, and of course it helps to have an authentic Eddie Murphy and Aresnio Hall when de-aging them in their recent movie.

(Business idea: "Do not deepfake" wristbands for performers)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:39 PM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


I always wonder about the logic of a goal like "draw attention to deepfakes and petition for their regulation" by creating one.

Perhaps it's a kind of "Hey, CIA, wanna slide into my DMs?" kinda deal.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:44 PM on March 9, 2021


I personally am a big fan of the impersonator, Miles Fisher's portrayal of Patrick Bateman in his music video for a cover of the Talking Heads' "This Must Be the Place." (NSFW, violence and sex)

Also the layers of abstraction and reference in that last sentence are so dense they're threatening to collapse, and I love that about this whole conversation.
posted by mmcg at 3:48 PM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


The existence of convincing deepfakes doesn't change anything.

It absolutely does. Right now the most common use of deepfakes is to create fake porn of real people (almost always women). You can say "you could never trust video anyway" but that's not much comfort to the woman whose ex has sent convincing deepfake porn of her to her family and friends and employer. This is already happening and deepfakes are only getting better and easier to manufacture. The development of this technology is really fucking terrifying.

This is a good article about deepfakes.
Deepfakes in fact have taken a serious toll on people’s lives, especially the lives of women. As is often the case with early uses of digital technologies, women are the canaries in the coal mine. According to Deeptrace Labs, of the approximately 15,000 deepfake videos appearing online, 96 percent involve deepfake sex videos; and 99 percent of those involve women’s faces being inserted into porn without consent. . . .

Human cognition predisposes us to be persuaded by visual and audio evidence, but especially so when the video or audio in question is of such quality that our eyes and ears cannot readily detect that something artificial is at work. Video and audio have a powerful impact on people. We credit them as true on the notion that we can believe what our eyes and ears are telling us. The more salacious and negative the deepfake, moreover, the more inclined we are to pass them on.
posted by Anonymous at 5:30 PM on March 9, 2021


loquacious > ...I can't remember the name of the technique or system off the top of my head but one of the new hot techniques is using extremely high definition video walls and rooms where instead of a green screen or analog/digital matte paintings they're projecting the entire scene in a sort of cyclorama style immersive room with live actors in it and it works a lot better than you would think when it goes to print...

For example, see the Art of LED Wall Virtual Production, Part One: ‘Lessons from the Mandalorian’ and Art of (LED Wall) Virtual Production Sets, Part Two: ‘How you make one’, fxguide, Mike Seymour, March 4/9, 2020:
...The new virtual production stage and workflow allows filmmakers to capture a significant amount of complex visual effects shots in-camera using real-time game engine technology and surrounding LED screens. This approach allows dynamic photo-real digital landscapes and sets to be live while filming, which dramatically reduces the need for greenscreen and produces the closest thing we have seen to a working ‘Holo-deck’ style of technology.

The process works as the camera films in mono and can dynamically update the background to match the perspectives and parallax a camera would record in real life. To do this the LED stage needs to work in combination with a motion capture volume which is aware of where the camera is and how it is moving. While this technology is producing stunning visuals for the Disney+ The Mandalorian, ILM is making its new end-to-end virtual production solution, ILM StageCraft, available for use by filmmakers, agencies, and showrunners worldwide....
posted by cenoxo at 9:46 PM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]


I was expecting this from Florida or Texas, not Pennsylvania:

Pa. woman created ‘deepfake’ videos to force rivals off daughter’s cheerleading squad: police
Police arrested a 50-year-old Bucks County woman March 10 for sending her teen daughter’s cheerleading coaches fake photos and videos depicting her rivals naked, drinking, or smoking, to try to get them kicked off the squad, according to media reports.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:43 AM on March 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


Mom’s rather grim mugshot might benefit from a little deepfakery.
posted by cenoxo at 4:44 AM on March 17, 2021


'The Mandalorian:' How Baby Yoda's Visit to Corvus Came to Be — The ILM VFX team describes its latest virtual production developments, first used to make the Disney+ series' season two., The Hollywood Reporter, Carolyn Giardina, April 1, 2021:
To craft season two of Jon Favreau's Disney+ series The Mandalorian, Industrial Light & Magic debuted updates to its virtual production system as seen in this new behind the scenes video (below) [*] with fresh footage and interviews with filmmakers including Favreau and Dave Filoni.

For the uninitiated, virtual production systems have become one of the most talked about new techniques in visual effects, effectively enabling filmmakers to create and then project an environment onto an LED wall, during production, allowing the filmmakers to capture more in camera and reduce the VFX work needed during postproduction.

"There are certain shots where you have live action in the foreground, you have a miniature shoot that was texture mapped onto the geometry of a digital environment on the wall and in the deep background are stop motion figures that are moving around," says Favreau in the video. "So you have all the different layers of techniques that come together to hopefully feel like one combined environment, all in real time."

ILM senior vp and chief creative officer Rob Bredow tells THR that the new version 2.0 of ILM's "Stagecraft," first used on season two, offered "the ability to create even higher resolution images on the walls at increased complexity" by upgraded software including ILM's Helios render engine, while using a new, larger (roughly 90 feet long, 75 feet wide and 22 feet tall) and higher resolution LED wall on set....
*The Virtual Production of The Mandalorian, Season Two, ILMVFX (YouTube), Apr 1, 2021, with more details at Stagecraft by Industrial Light & Magic.
posted by cenoxo at 8:55 AM on April 6, 2021


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