TikTok’s ‘Deep Fakes’ of Billie Eilish, Tom Cruise, and Elizabeth Olsen are Cause For Concern

TikTok’s latest trend involves celebrities’ faces and artificial technology, also known as ‘deep fakes.’ Deep fakes refers the use of technology to paste and animate someone’s face on an unrelated video. Most recently, people have been using popular to celebrities to manipulate videos and deceive TikTok users into believing that the said celebrity was genuinely involved in the contorted video.

The most popular viral video last week, convinced many people that Tom Cruise really made a TikTok. Check out for yourself. It is very convincing.

https://twitter.com/laurenmwhite/status/1364813376644403200?s=20

Scary, right? Well, TikTok is not done with Deep fakes yet. In fact, the app is blowing up with celebrity deep fakes pulling faces of Eddie Murphy to Billie Eilish.

Celebrity Deep fakes

This TikTok pulled Billie Eilish’s face and pasted it on Alicia Silverstone’s character, Cher, on the movie ‘Clueless.’ The animation matches Eilish’s face up almost flawlessly to Silverstone’s and you cannot tell that the video was ever manipulated.

The Impressions App is one of the platforms where users can swap faces with celebrities. They recently posted this clip on TikTok where they placed Eddie Murphy’s face on Jay Pharoah.

They also posted this clip of a woman impersonating Elizabeth Olsen’s character on Wandavision:

Will Deep fakes Become An Issue?

There is a lot of concern around manipulating faces to do and say whatever you want. Deep fakes were originally created for pornography, but have quickly became popular in a more casual setting on TikTok, Youtube, and Reddit. It is not quite as innocent as face swap on Snapchat, but allows users to potentially cause issues for the person they are impersonating.

For example, a deep fake user recently used Former President, Barack Obama’s face, to call Donald Trump a “complete dipsh*t.” Someone else also used the face of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to convince people that Zuckerberg planned to use personal data for “control,” over people.

Will TikTok Combat It?

In the age of misinformation easily being spread on social media platforms, there is no room on the internet for the deceiving nature of these deep fake videos. TikTok announced last August that they were going to update their, “policies on misleading content to provide better clarity on what is and isn’t allowed on TikTok,” but as we are now in 2021, and Deep Fakes continue to gain traction on the app, it does not look like much is being done surrounding the issue.

Twitter is Worried

Many Twitter users are taking to the app to speak out about how terrifying the future of deep fakes is becoming, many are calling for the technology to be banned.

Journalist and news anchor, Jake Tapper commented not the issue vie Twitter saying, “Deep fakes are clearly going to be a serious problem in the disinformation era.”

This Twitter user wrote, “not sure why deep fakes are seen as a quirkly lil funny internet tool and not a digital weapon that’ll start ruining people’s lives soon, systemically and interpersonally,” and we have to agree. Technology like this could easily be weaponized.

https://twitter.com/afroelven/status/1366791443990384650?s=20

Monica Lewinsky even jumped on the platform saying, “i think deepfakes are incredibly dangerous. they will insidiously undermine our legal system, news… basically reality.”

We will wait to see if social media platform do anything to further combat this issue before it becomes out of control. With many users concerned for the future of artificial intelligence, it is hopeful that technology will be made to detect fake deep videos.

What do you think about deep fakes? Do they worry you or do you think it is harmless fun? Let us know in the comments!

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