The scandal with the pseudo-documentary: the media is studying the details of the use of Tom Cruise’s deepfake

Pro-Russian propagandists are stepping up their efforts to denigrate next month’s Summer Olympics in Paris and undermine Western support for Ukraine through a series of brazen online and offline stunts, private experts and Western officials told CNN. Therefore, the publication decided to study the details of this case.

The stunts included using artificial intelligence to impersonate the voice of actor Tom Cruise narrating a fake documentary about an attack on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and placing a coffin near the Eiffel Tower with a sign about the war in Ukraine, the sources said.

Experts tracking Russian disinformation told CNN that the activity is part of an increasingly frantic effort by Russian operatives to tarnish the Olympics and halt any momentum Ukraine is building to use Western-made weapons to attack Russian territory. The IOC imposed restrictions on the participation of Russian athletes in the Paris Olympics due to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

There is a mixture of desperation and opportunism in the recent wave of propaganda, said Gavin Wild, a former Russia expert at the National Security Council.

“For the tech-savvy propagandists working in Russia, the alternative they fear is not irrelevant — a one-way trip to the front line.” Wild told CNN.

The Russian embassy in France called the accusations “Russophobic”.

“The embassy declares that the Russian Federation has never interfered and is not interfering in the internal affairs of France – our country has other more important priorities. The embassy calls on the French authorities to stop this baseless and unjustified anti-Russian disinformation campaign.”, – said the statement of the embassy, ​​published in French.

Russian operatives used a fake Cruise voice, a Netflix logo and even a fake New York Times review to try to lend legitimacy to the documentary, according to Microsoft analysts who released a report on the activity on Sunday. According to Microsoft, a propaganda video posted on social media platform Telegram last year was “the first glimpse of what appears to be a large-scale campaign” by the same Russian propagandist to discredit the Paris Olympics.

Russian propagandists are also creating fake news stories that claim Parisians are buying property insurance because of terrorism fears around the Olympics, as well as fake press releases purporting to be from the CIA and French intelligence that warn of terrorism, Microsoft said.

CNN has reached out to the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC for comment.

It is unclear who created the video. US officials and private experts have not publicly identified the source of the video.

“While this video is clearly fake, it is a step towards what counter-disinformation researchers have warned about – the use of AI-manipulated media to bolster foreign disinformation operations.” – said in a statement of the State Department for CNN.

The Russian Embassy in South Africa shared a version of the video on their X accounts, according to screenshots taken by a BBC journalist.

Hani Farid, a digital forensic expert and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the video showed signs of AI manipulation.

Farid ran the video through multiple deepfake detection systems and said they indicated the voices in the video were created using artificial intelligence and the State Department spokesman’s lip movements in the video were altered using lip sync AI software.

“Even if not everyone believes a fake, the constant bombardment of deepfakes leads to a general skepticism of everything we see on the Internet.” Farid said.

But Lee Foster, another information operations expert, expressed skepticism that the image in the video was generated by artificial intelligence.

“Looking at it from an analytical point of view, it doesn’t make sense to use artificial intelligence to manipulate mouth movements so that they are basically identical to the original. However, AI manipulation of video audio remains an open question.” Foster told CNN.