Best Deepfake Yet?

Watching a new deepfake video I’ve embedded below was *very* sobering to watch this morning. It points out how incredibly far we’ve gone with deepfakes and, most importantly, how I found this one almost impossible to detect as a fake video.

The obvious tipoff this is fake is that both Cruise and Hilton look much younger than reality (because the fake actor & actress are actually much younger than the ‘real’ celebrities) but from a technology perspective I couldn’t detect this as a fake. Even the voices were spot-on.

Yikes.

The video is short and, because it was on TikTok and I was led to it by a Reddit post, decided to screen record on my iPad in order to capture it to embed here in this post (and I also wanted to keep this one as a major milestone deepfake).

I can’t even describe how deeply troubling this is as this deepfake capability will be weaponized politically and I shudder to think what will happen as the 2024 presidential election process begins. So instead of a critical-thinking baseball sized cap to wear, we’re all gonna need a ten-gallon cowboy hat going forward!