Belgian VFX artist Chris Ume creates viral deepfake Tom Cruise TikTok videos

A series of highly convincing deepfake videos featuring a synthetic Tom Cruise have gone viral on TikTok, amassing nearly 12 million views in a week. The videos were created by Belgian visual effects artist Chris Ume, who spent two months training an AI program on thousands of images of Cruise to produce a digital replica. Each clip, lasting under a minute, required 24 hours of post-production. Ume emphasized that the sophistication of his work is not easily replicable, stating, "It's a fantasy that people can do this from their computer: you can't create art using a bicycle." He began experimenting with synthetic media in 2018 after seeing a news report, and his hyper-realistic results were made possible by his expertise in traditional VFX and deepfake technology, high-end hardware, and the assistance of Tom Cruise look-alike Miles Fisher. The account @deeptomcruise has sparked renewed fears about the potential for misinformation, though Ume's intentions appear benign. Social media platforms have responded with varying policies: TikTok banned misleading synthetic content in August 2020, Facebook prohibits deepfakes with exceptions for parody and satire, and Twitter labels manipulated media, removing it only if it could cause harm.