Tom Hanks has become the latest victim of an AI-generated video hoax, with a fake video of the star supposedly promoting a dental plan.
The 67-year-old actor shared an image from the video with his 9.5 million Instagram followers, writing “BEWARE!!”
“There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it.”
It’s something we’re beginning to see more frequently with the advanced level of AI and deep fakes that can now create videos that seem scarily real.
Let’s not forget the UK TV series entirely generated by deep fake actors, with characters resembling the spitting image of stars like Rihanna, Greta Thunberg, Tom Holland, Ariana Grande and even Kim Kardashian.
Tom Hanks spoke about the threat of AI technology on an episode of the Adam Buxton podcast he featured on in May.
“The first time we did a movie that had a huge amount of our own data locked in a computer — literally what we looked like — was a movie called The Polar Express,” he said.
“We saw this coming. We saw that there was going to be this ability to take zeros and ones inside a computer and turn it into a face and a character. Now that has only grown a billion-fold since then, and we see it everywhere.”
He expressed the concern of many actors in the industry right now, sharing how difficult it can be for people to tell the difference between himself and an AI-generated version of him.
“I can tell you that there [are] discussions going on in all of the guilds, all of the agencies, and all of the legal firms to come up with the legal ramifications of my face and my voice — and everybody else’s — being our intellectual property,”
“Outside of the understanding that it’s been done by AI or deep fake, there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone, and it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality.” he said.
Hear the full chat about the threat of AI on Tom Hanks’ episode of the Adam Buxton podcast below.
