Legendary actor Tom Hanks warned his fans Sunday that a video appearing to show Hanks advertising a dental plan is an AI-generated deepfake used without his permission.
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“BEWARE!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it,” the actor said in an Instagram post, signing it with his name.
The Instagram post, which was a screenshot of the alleged ad, had no caption, unlike Hanks’ previous eight posts. All of the text was presented in an overlay of the image, possibly to thwart automated text crawlers that can scrape massive amounts of online data.
The screenshot features a younger-looking, slightly distorted Hanks with unnaturally smooth features and a surreal look. But it’s still unmistakably an image of the “Castaway” star. (RELATED: ‘Forrest Gump’ Director To De-Age Tom Hanks, Robin Wright In ‘Here’)
Hanks has spoken often in recent months about the rapid pace of progression that automated intelligence has had and how that has affected and will affect the movie industry.
“We saw this coming,” Hanks told podcaster Adam Buxton in May. “We saw that there was going to be this ability to take zeroes and ones inside a computer and turn it into a face and character. Now that has only grown a billionfold since then, and we see it everywhere.”
The actor even revealed he’d been offered opportunities to spin his younger self into potential decades of movies. “Right now if I wanted to, I could get together and pitch a series of seven movies that would star me in them in which I would be 32 years old from now until kingdom come. Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deepfake technology,” Hanks told Buxton.