So who’s gonna tell him?
It looks like even celebrities sometimes mistake things as real on the internet and in the process get trolled online. Recently Justin Bieber was an innocent victim of a deepfake version of Tom Cruise and thought he was actually responding to the real actor.
In case you don’t know what deepfake is, it’s an AI-generated synthetic media that can be used to swap an existing person’s image with another one, making it look like the original. Over the years, deepfake technology has gotten better and better and it has become more difficult to spot a fake video from a real one and this is exactly what happened with Bieber when he fell prey to a TikTok account named “DeepTomCruise” that posts videos of a ‘fake’ Tom Cruise doing random things.
Bieber shared a video of the deepfake Tom Cruise playing guitar on his Instagram story and tagged the real Tom Cruise. That’s not all, he also complimented the actor on his musical talent and then proceeded to challenge him to a fight (well that escalated quickly). “@Tomcruise I’m impressed with your guitar skills,” Bieber wrote in his post. “But you could still catch these hands my boy.” Soon after that, Beiber again tagged the real Tom Cruise in another post with the same video and added, “ALL JOKES ASIDE @tomcruise your shredding on that guitar.” This just goes to show how easy it is to trick people with these photoshopping and editing softwares and how it’ll only get worse in the future with more accurate results.
Turns out, Bieber realized his mistake, and two hours after posting the Instagram story, he added another post and wrote, “That’s not really Tom Cruise? Lol, oh well, still hilarious.” Meanwhile, Tom Cruise must be confused as to why Bieber is suddenly tagging him in posts and hasn’t responded publicly to the posts yet.