A visual effects specialist who created deepfake photos andvideos of Hollywood actor Tom Cruise that went viral on various social mediaplatforms, has defended his work, saying the public should not be worried about'one-click fakes'.
In a report in The Verge, Belgium VFX specialist Chris Umesaid that you can't create deepfakes -- in the eye of storm for many forviolating users' privacy -- with just pressing a button.
"That's important, that's a message I want to tellpeople. Each clip took weeks of work," he was quoted as saying in thereport on Friday.
"By combining traditional CGI and VFX with deepfakes,it makes it better. I make sure you don't see any of the glitches," saidUme who has been working with deepfakes for years.
On TikTok, the account @deeptomcruise racked up tens ofthousands of followers and likes.
Ume pulled the videos briefly but then restored them.
"We had fun. I created awareness. I showed my skills.We made people smile. And that's it, the project is done," he said.
TikTok said the account was well within its rules for parodyuses of deepfakes.
For some, deep fakes pose privacy challenges.
Deepfakes are being treated as video forgeries that makepeople appear to be saying things they never did, like the popular forgedvideos of Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and that of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosithat went viral last year.
Microsoft in September last year unveiled a new tool thatwill spot deepfakes or synthetic media which are photos, videos or audio filesmanipulated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) which are very hard to identify iffalse or not.
"The most difficult thing is making it (deepfake) lookalive. You can see it in the eyes when it's not right," Ume noted.
"It's like Photoshop 20 years ago, people didn't knowwhat photo editing was, and now they know about these fakes".