Russia targets Paris Olympics with deepfake Tom Cruise video

Russia is targeting the Paris Olympics with a disinformation campaign that includes deploying a deepfake Tom Cruise to narrate a documentary criticising the organisation behind the games, according to a new report from Microsoft. Microsoft said a network of Russia-affiliated groups are running "malign influence campaigns" against France, Emmanuel Macron, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Paris Games with the event less than 80 days away. Russia has been banned from the 2024 Olympics, although a small number of Russian athletes may compete as neutrals. The fake Cruise video, which appeared on the Telegram messaging platform last year, is called Olympics Has Fallen and uses artificial intelligence-generated audio of the film star's voice to present a "strange, meandering script" disparaging the IOC. The documentary, whose title riffs on the Gerard Butler action film Olympus Has Fallen, also claims falsely to have been produced by Netflix and is promoted with bogus five-star reviews from the New York Times and the BBC.