Deepfake Video of Bill Hader Turning Into Tom Cruise and Seth Rogen Gives Netizens the Creeps

A new Deepfake video that features Bill Hader turning into Seth Rogen and then Tom Cruise posted by a Ctrl Shift Face user on YouTube just went viral, causing some Twitter users to talk wildly about the “end of the world.”

The initial video featured American comedian and actor Bill Hader on Saturday Night Live back in 2008, discussing his table read for the movie Tropic Thunder. While doing impressions of Seth Rogen and Tom Cruise, Harder’s face smoothly transferred into the faces of actors he was mimicking – a metamorphosis so impeccable and ingenious that it almost made the Internet explode.

​However, some users pointed out the “scary” side of such a deep penetration of Deepface techniques into our lives and how it could be used to easily manipulate information and even lead to the “end of the world” as we know it. 

Deepfake is a set of techniques that tend to combine existing human images and videos and apply them onto source images based on machine learning techniques and neural network software. The use of generative adversarial networks (GAN) technology can also help to create entirely unique images.

The term firstly appeared on Reddit as a username for an account that was publishing fake videos of females with celebrities’ faces engaged in sexual relationships. This led to a community of users producing software tools that enabled the combination of faces and bodies of different people, later applied to political figures and other celebrities.