Russian brokers deploy AI-produced Tom Cruise narrator to tar Summer time Olympics

Final yr, a feature-length documentary purportedly produced by Netflix started circulating on Telegram. Titled “Olympics have Fallen” and narrated by a voice with a putting similarity to that of actor Tom Cruise, it sharply criticized the management of the Worldwide Olympic Committee. The slickly produced movie, claiming five-star opinions from the New York Occasions, Washington Submit, and BBC, was shortly amplified on social media. Amongst these seemingly endorsing the documentary had been celebrities on the platform Cameo.

A recently published report by Microsoft (PDF) mentioned the movie was not a documentary, had obtained no such opinions, and that the narrator’s voice was an AI-produced deep pretend of Cruise. It additionally mentioned the endorsements on Cameo had been faked. The Microsoft Menace Intelligence Report went on to say that the fraudulent documentary and endorsements had been solely considered one of many elaborate hoaxes created by brokers of the Russian authorities in a year-long affect operation supposed to discredit the Worldwide Olympic Committee (IOC) and deter participation and attendance on the Paris Olympics beginning subsequent month.

Different examples of the Kremlin’s ongoing affect operation embody:

• A video purporting to be from Brussels-based media outlet Euro Information claimed Parisians had been shopping for property insurance coverage in anticipation of terrorism on the Video games.
• A pretend video pretending to come back from French broadcaster France24 claimed that 24 % of tickets for the video games had been returned as a result of fears of terrorism.
• Faux video press releases had been produced posing as coming from the CIA and the French Common Directorate for Inner Safety (DGSI) warning potential attendees to keep away from the Paris 2024 Olympics as a result of alleged threat of a terror assault.
• An array of 15 distinctive French-language “information” websites, together with a core disinformation outlet named Dependable Latest Information (RRN) that made claims of rampant IOC corruption and warned of potential violence on the Video games. The websites try to impersonate French retailers Le Parisien and Le Level to amplify the claims and castigate French President Emmanuel Macron and his authorities.

Members of the Microsoft Menace Evaluation Heart—a workforce that tracks hacking and affect campaigns of nation-state actors—have attributed a lot of the exercise to 2 distinct teams tracked underneath the names Storm-1679 and Storm-1099. Each teams have spent years sowing Kremlin speaking factors in Western media.

“Beginning in June 2023, prolific Russian affect actors—which Microsoft tracks as Storm-1679 and Storm-1099—pivoted their operations to take goal on the 2024 Olympic Video games and French President Emmanuel Macron,” MTAC members wrote. “These ongoing Russian affect operations have two central goals: to denigrate the fame of the IOC on the world stage; and to create the expectation of violence breaking out in Paris through the 2024 Summer time Olympic Video games.”