Have you seen clips from a new documentary narrated by Tom Cruise called Olympics Has Fallen, a play on the title of the 2013 movie Olympus Has Fallen? The new film claims to document the corruption in the upcoming Olympic Games in Paris, France. But it’s fake. Cruise’s narration was created with artificial intelligence and the “documentary” is actually the work of disinformation agents tied to the Russian government, according to a new report from researchers at Microsoft.
The fake documentary is tied to two influence groups in Russia, dubbed Storm-1679 and Storm-1099 by Microsoft, and it’s easy to see how some people could be duped. The film comes in four 9-minute episodes, each starting with Netflix’s signature “ta-dum” sound effect and red-N animation.
“In this series you will discover the inner workings of the global sports industry,” the fake Tom Cruise says as dramatic music plays in the background. “In particular, I will shed some light on the venal executives of the International Olympic Committee, IOC, who are slowly and painfully destroying the Olympic sports that have existed for thousands of years.”
But there are plenty of signs that this movie is bullshit to anyone paying attention. For starters, Cruise’s voice is realistic but sometimes has a stilted delivery. The big giveaway, however, might be words used by the Russian campaign that wouldn’t be used by Americans. For example, the first episode includes a line from the fake Cruise narration where he talks about a “hockey match” rather than a hockey game. The word “match” is much more common in Russia for sports like soccer and any real fan of ice hockey in the U.S. would be calling it a game, not a match.
There are also times when the fake Cruise narration sounds like it’s reading strategy notes made by the people who concocted this piece of disinformation. Much of the documentary spends time trying to tear down the organizers of the Olympics as hopelessly corrupt, and AI-generated Cruise tries to tie it to one of the actor’s most famous roles in the 1990s.
“In Jerry Maguire, my character writes a 25-page-long firm mission statement about dishonesty in the sports management business. Jerry wanted justice for athletes, which makes him extremely relatable,” the narration says.
It’s hard to imagine a line like that making it into an authentic documentary.
The fake documentary also has some editing errors that stick out as particularly odd, like when the AI Cruise inexplicably repeats a line, the audio briefly cutting out for no discernible reason. The entire film is available on the messaging app Telegram, where Gizmodo watched it. We’ve uploaded a minute of the film below just to give a sense of how realistic the AI-generated narration sounds.
The fake documentary first surfaced in June 2023, according to Microsoft, but appears to be getting renewed attention as the Olympics get closer. The games start in Paris on July 26 and are scheduled to last through August 11.
As Microsoft points out in a report published Sunday, the Storm-1679 group has been trying to instill fear in people about attending the 2024 Olympics in France. Fake videos purporting to show warnings from the CIA claim the games are at risk of a major terrorist attack. And other videos made to look like they’re from reputable news outlets, like France24, “claimed that 24% of tickets for the games had been returned due to fears of terrorism.” That’s simply not true.
More recently, the disinformation agents have tried to stoke fear around the current war in Gaza, claiming there could be terrorism in France tied to the conflict.
“Storm-1679 has also sought to use the Israel-Hamas conflict to fabricate threats to the Games,” Microsoft wrote in the new report. “In November 2023, it posted images claiming to show graffiti in Paris threatening violence against Israeli citizens attending the Games. Microsoft assesses this graffiti was digitally generated and unlikely to exist at a physical location.”
That said, some of the information in the pseudo-documentary is actually true. For example, the film discusses the history of Wu Ching-kuo, the head of amateur boxing’s governing body Aiba, who was suspended for financial mismanagement claims. Other claims about Olympic officials are also true, according to the news sources available online. But that’s to be expected. The most successful propaganda mixes fact and fiction in an effort to make people unsure about what the truth might be.
All we know for certain is that Tom Cruise never narrated this movie. And if someone is trying to hijack the credibility of a major movie star to spread their message, you should always be skeptical of whatever they have to say—especially as bots help spread that media widely across social media platforms.
“While video has traditionally been a powerful tool for Russian IO campaigns and will remain so, we are likely to see a tactical shift towards online bots and automated social media accounts,” Microsoft wrote on Sunday. “These can offer the illusion of widespread support by quickly flooding social media channels and give the Russians a level of plausible deniability.”
+ There are no comments
Add yours