After chasing an old-school scammer in 2002’s Catch Me If You Can, Tom Hanks is now on the hunt for those using AI to recreate his likeness. The actor took to Instagram this weekend to warn his fans about some shady entity using his AI-generated likeness to peddle a dental plan.
“BEWARE!!” Hanks wrote in an Instagram post yesterday. “There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it.”
Hanks, understandably, did not disclose the company or organisation that is behind the deepfake, and the actor did not immediately return Gizmodo’s request for comment. The likeness of Hanks used by this campaign appears to be generated from an image of the actor owned by the Los Angeles Times.
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The news comes as the daughter of late comedian Robin Williams has expressed her disdain for AI-generation recreations of her father’s voice. As noted by The Hollywood Reporter Zelda Williams posted on her Instagram story yesterday to say that she finds the use of AI copycats depicting her father’s voice “personally disturbing.” She went on to say that artificial intelligence either creates “a poor facsimile of greater people” or “a horrendous Frankensteinian monster.”
Hanks and Williams’s posts come as Hollywood grapples with the use of AI in the movie and television industry. The Writer’s Guild of America and the Screen Actor’s Guild went on strike this May and July, respectively, with generative AI technology being a key issue. WGA’s strike just recently came to an end after almost five months as writers and studios came to an agreement, which prominently forbids studios from using AI-written content as source material for productions. SAG, meanwhile, remains on strike. A previous proposition included studios scanning background actors’ faces to be owned in perpetuity to create digital likenesses, in exchange for one day’s pay.