Chris Ume, with the help of Tom Cruise impersonator Miles Fisher, created highly believable deepfakes of Tom Cruise and posted the videos to TikTok. Ume showed the breakdown of the arduous process of training the A.I. model and editing each frame.
The Verge talked to Ume more about the process:
“You can’t do it by just pressing a button,” says Ume. “That’s important, that’s a message I want to tell people.” Each clip took weeks of work, he says, using the open-source DeepFaceLab algorithm as well as established video editing tools. “By combining traditional CGI and VFX with deepfakes, it makes it better. I make sure you don’t see any of the glitches.”
The results are both entertaining and worrisome.
