Tom Hanks has warned fans that a dental plan using his image is in fact fake and was created without his permission with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
Taking to the social media platform Instagram, the actor warned his 9.5 million followers about the non-consensual ad:
“BEWARE!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it,” Tom Hanks’ posted, with a screenshot of the AI-generated image of himself from the advert.
The contentious advert follows in the wake of the Oscar-award winning actor previously expressing his concerns about the use of AI in film and TV.
Speaking to British comedian Adam Buxton on his podcast earlier this year, Tom Hanks said: “We saw this coming.
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“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 billionfold since then, and we see it everywhere.”
“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,” he added.
Tom Hanks, originally referring to the then upcoming Hollywood writes strike, also spoke about the lack of regulations of AI impressions in the media:
“I could be hit by a bus tomorrow, and that’s it, but performances can go on and on and on and on. And outside of the understanding that it’s been done with AI or 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.”
It is not the first time the lack of rules surrounding AI in film and advertising has been brought up.
Following Netflix’s dark dystopian TV series, Black Mirror, featuring an episode ‘Joan is Afraid’, which showed an actor’s AI-generated likeness be used without their consent in a TV show, questions have been raised about the ethics of the currently unregulated yet rapidly growing AI industry.
Earlier this year, Ogilvy called for a crackdown on AI-generated social media ads, while GOOD published a charter urging for more AI transparency within the sector.
