Ever since his Oprah couch-bouncing incident, the world has been keeping a close eye on Tom Cruise’s maniacal laugh.

You know the one – he also repeatedly unleashed it in that weird Scientology recruitment video years back.

I’ve popped that video in at the bottom of the story if you want to revisit it.

Three days ago, it emerged again, this time on TikTok.

According to The Daily Beast, a TikTok account going by @deeptomcruise began posting video clips of Cruise, except it isn’t Cruise.

The account currently has three videos, all of which are deepfakes showing him doing a magic trick, tripping in a clothing store in Italy, and golfing.

The creepy thing is how convincing they are:

There are a few tells that this isn’t real.

For one thing, he’s younger in these videos, and also taller. At the same time, it would be tough to tell the difference between a real video of Cruise and the videos above if you weren’t looking closely.

As photographer Lauren White wrote, “Deep fakes are getting scary good and taking over TikTok. Every public figure should just be on there with a verified account—even if they don’t want to make content—to make it easier to identify their fakes.”

We’ve seen a couple of convincing ones over the years like the one with Robert Downey Jr., Ewan McGregor, Jeff Goldblum, and again – Tom Cruise.

I’m going with the Step Brothers one as my favourite, though.

Here’s how it works:

To make a deepfake video, a creator swaps one person’s face and replaces it with another, using a facial recognition algorithm and a deep learning computer network called a variational auto-encoder [VAE].

VAEs are trained to encode images into low-dimensional representations and then decode those representations back into images.

I’ll leave you with Tom’s Scientology video, as promised.

This one doesn’t need a complicated facial recognition algorithm, because it’s creepy all on its own:

[source:dailybeast]