Viral Video: Deepfake Artist Morphs Bill Hader Into Tom Cruise & Seth Rogen

Ok, this is pretty disconcerting.

Deepfake creator "Ctrl Shift Face" took a clip from the David Letterman show, when actor Bill Hader was a guest in 2008, and morphed Hader's face into Tom Cruise and Seth Rogen.

In the chat, Hader describes meeting Cruise at an early table read for Tropic Thunder.

As Hader shared meeting Cruise for the first time, he mimicked Cruise’s voice and mannerisms perfectly. He went on to tell Cruise about actor Seth Rogen, whom Cruise had recently met, and when Hader mimicked Rogen for Cruise, Cruise was floored.

Ctrl Shift Face took that video clip, and as Hader mimics Cruise and then Rogen, the video artist smoothly morphs Hader's face into the two actors' faces.

Watch below. The first morph begins around the :55 mark, and then Rogen morph happens around 1:55 mark. Eerie.

From Rolling Stone:

After the Hader clip went viral, The Guardian tracked down the man behind Ctrl Shift Face, a Slovakian man in the Czech Republic who said his name was Tom.

While Tom acknowledged the potential political dangers deepfake videos pose, he said clips like Nancy Pelosi ostensibly slurring her speech (which, while not technically a deepfake, was doctored in an effort to influence public opinion by distorting the original clip) are often easy to debunk: “You can show the original and boom, you have the proof.” Far more concerning, and way easier to make, Tom said, are fake news articles circulating on Facebook and websites designed to look like legitimate news sources.

Still, Tom said he hoped his videos would make people more aware of the growing prevalence of this kind of technology. “People need to learn to be more critical,” he said. “The general public are aware that photos could be Photoshopped, but they have no idea that this could be done with video.”

(h/t JoeMyGod)