Tom Cruise has become a viral hit on TikTok
or has he?
That’s freaky, man.
We’re living in freaky times right now.
Looks exactly like Tom Cruise.
In this reel, you’re going to see my amigo Chris Umé.
He’s going to introduce to you the wonderful world of deepfakes,
how AI and VFX are unlocking the future of our imagination.
I made the Tom Cruise deepfake,
And it was one of the biggest viral deepfake videos
on the internet, ever.
[SuperUsers]
[Chris Umé]
I’m Chris, and I’m a VFX and AI artist.
I’m trained as a cameraman.
I’ve been doing VFX for about eight years.
The first time I heard about deepfakes is the end of 2018.
It was on a new channel where they were talking about
people misusing the technology in pornographic videos,
and that made me realize there were a lot of creative possibilities.
A deepfake is a video where
someone’s face has been changed into another.
So, for example, in the videos I make with Miles Fisher,
you don’t see Miles Fisher’s face.
No, you see Tom Cruise’s face.
I just overlaid it on top of Miles.
And with your help in 2020 together.
We’ll dominate the ballot box.
This is no stunt.
The way I train in deepfake is where I tell a computer model
to start training thousands of images of a certain character.
In my case, it’s Tom Cruise.
Thousands of images,
all his expressions, all his angles.
So in the end, I have one big model,
and it’s one big Tom Cruise model.
All of Tom Cruise’s emotion is in this model.
Every now and then, I like to treat myself.
And it’s good because discipline... oh.
At the end of 2020,
I got contacted by Miles Fisher,
Tom Cruise impersonator, one of the world’s best.
He was doing this
where he’s impersonating Tom Cruise going for presidency.
Why vote for me?
I’m not just your everyman.
I’ve literally been...
Every. Man.
I’ve been a navy pilot.
A lawyer.
And a navy lawyer.
And a few weeks after the video,
he contacted me again,
and he asked me, “Would you like to do a collaboration,
just have some fun?”
So he sent me this video where he was standing in his garden,
and he was saying, like,
“Go watch my podcast,” because Miles has a podcast,
“Go watch and listen to my podcast,” or just something really simple.
And two days after I sent him the final video,
he sent me a screenshot,
and he actually made a TikTok account called deeptomcruise.
And he sent me a screenshot of the channel,
and we had 45,000 followers and 2.5 million views.
I'm going to show you some magic.
It's the real thing,
I mean...
it’s all... the real... thing.
When you watch our videos, I want you to be perplexed, like,
“Is this Tom Cruise or is it someone else?”
So the first video now is the one where he’s playing golf.
And that one went viral; it’s unbelievable.
Twitter was overloading.
If you typed it in YouTube or on Google,
you'll find so many articles.
And I think after a few days, or after a week or two,
we had 10 million views on that specific video.
We had a few videos,
and all of them went viral in their own way.
So you had a lot of people talking in the comments section,
talking about, “This is Tom Cruise.”
“No, it isn’t Tom Cruise.”
This dude on the left has been pulling
a real Tom Cruise thing for a while with the deepfake.
And when I saw this article, I was like,
“Oh, makes sense why it looks so good,”
because the guy, his face shape is basically Tom Cruise.
And they were trying to convince each other
to believe in certain ideas, like it’s Tom Cruise just being weird
because he’s going to make a new movie.
The fourth of July.
I’m Tom Cruise, and I’m running for president of the United States.
America...
You complete me!
I’m guessing we got 100 million plus views.
At one point, Miles told me, “Maybe it’s good because
I’m pretty sure Tom Cruise has seen these videos now.”
We sent an email to his agency,
“And let’s just say, if you want us to stop what we’re doing,
we’ll take videos offline.”
And after that, he called his agency,
and he asked them, “Did you receive the email?”
And they say, “Yeah, we received it.”
But we still haven’t got a reply,
so we guess it’s OK.