The Tom Cruise & Brad Pitt AI Fight Video Was a Sham

Last week, Deadpool writer Rhett Reese was widely roasted after commenting on a viral AI fight video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us,” Reese said, and it didn’t take long for half the internet to fire back that, of course, the guy who writes Deadpool would think 15 seconds of punching is a threat.

Well, get ready to have your mind blown. It turns out the fake video of fake Tom Cruise and fake Brad Pitt fake fighting is fake AI. What does that even mean? Let’s just say an Irish filmmaker did not have a Hollywood fight scene farted into his lap after typing just two lines into Seedance 2.0.

Here’s what software developer and AI debunker Aron Peterson easily found while doing some digging:

I was pretty sure what we were looking at was a bog standard video to video workflow (with image references of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt provided for face replacement and consistency) because we can see the camera movement and AI video generators are really bad at simulating realistic camera moves, especially handheld shaky cam. Sure, the Seedance 2.0 model is newer and thus more reliable, but it was highly unlikely that just two prompts and thirty seconds were needed to generate a full multi-angle fight scene.

Being the enthusiastic fact checker I hopped over to Seedance’s website and it only took 10 seconds to find green screen footage of two stuntmen performing the same fight choreography we see in the Cruise vs Pitt scene. Seedance had used the green screen footage for a different demo - this time using a prompt for an anime style fight scene.

In a nutshell, Seedance did what every AI company is doing right now: Faked the results to build up hype. “The evidence appears to show that stuntmen were filmed from several angles, that a clip had to be generated for every angle, and then finally all clips were stitched together for marketing,” Peterson writes.

What was the big tell? AI actors don’t need to fake their hits because they don’t have real faces. “Pitt and Cruise are pulling their punches and sometimes acting hit when there is a clear missed punch. That’s something actors and stuntmen have to do to avoid hurting each other, but in a purely AI generated video that shouldn’t be a thing.”

Peterson published his results two days ago along with the damning video below, but as of this writing, Rhett Reese has yet to comment on completely folding over and dying after watching a fake sizzle reel. What should concern him is if AI learns to be as obnoxious as Ryan Reynolds. Is that even possible? Can a machine run a character so hard into the ground that you’ll drive off a cliff if see it talk to the camera one more freaking time? These are the existential questions we’re left to ponder in this terrifying technological age.