Slick Tom Cruise Deepfakes Signal That Near Flawless Forgeries May Be Here

Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at UC Berkeley, says the dangers in sophisticated phony videos called "deepfakes" are amplified in their potential to travel rapidly across social media. Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at UC Berkeley, says the dangers in sophisticated phony videos called "deepfakes" are amplified in their potential to travel rapidly across social media. The videos, uploaded to TikTok in recent weeks by the account @deeptomcruise, have raised new fears over the proliferation of convincing deepfakes -- the nickname for media generated by artificial intelligence technology showing phony events that often seem realistic enough to dupe an audience. Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told NPR's All Things Considered that the Cruise videos demonstrate a step up in the technology's evolving sophistication. "This is clearly a new category of deepfake that we have not seen before," said Farid, who researches digital forensics and misinformation.