Oscar-winning star Tom Hanks is warning fans that a video commercial that seems to show him selling dental insurance was created by artificial intelligence and that he has nothing at all to do with the product or the company selling it.
On Sunday, Hanks let his 9.5 million Instagram followers know that the video of what looks like a younger Tom Hanks selling insurance is all fakery.
“Beware,” he captioned the photo of the fake AI Hanks. “There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it.”
According to The Messenger, Hanks spoke about the problems with AI during an episode of The Adam Buxton Podcast in May.
“I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but performances can go on and on and on and on,” Hanks said. “Outside the understanding of AI and deepfake, 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. That’s certainly an artistic challenge but it’s also a legal one.”
Artificial Intelligence was a main bone of contention between the writers and the studios, but with the tentative end of the Hollywood writer’s strike, real human artists feel they made a first important step in promoting the work of humans above that of computers.
The tentative settlement maintains that studios cannot force writers to use AI and that AI products may only be used in conjunction with human writers, not as a replacement, the Associated Press reported.
“This is the first step on a long process of negotiating and working through what generative AI means for the creative industry — not just writers but visual artists, actors, you name it,” David Gunkel, a professor of media studies at Northern Illinois University, told the AP.
Still, even as many are celebrating these provisions, industry executive legend Barry Diller says that the protections don’t go far enough.
“Fair use needs to redefined, because what they have done is sucked up everything and that violates the basis of the copyright law,” Diller told CNBC. “All we want to do is establish that there is no such thing as fair use for AI, which gives us standing.”
“They spent months trying to craft words to protect writers from AI and they ended up with a paragraph that protected nothing from no one,” he said.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, or Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston