Tom Hanks has spoken out against an advert using an AI-generated version of his likeness without his consent.
Over the weekend, the two-time Oscar nominee warned his Instagram followers about an ad for a dental plan that used artificial intelligence technology to make it appear he’d given it his endorsement.
“BEWARE!!” he wrote alongside a still image of the ad in question.
“There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it.”
Tom previously spoke about his concerns regarding AI during an interview on Adam Buxton’s podcast earlier this year.
“We saw this coming,” he explained. “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.”
The potential threat of AI technology is one of the central issues in the ongoing actors’ strikes in Hollywood, and formed part of the storyline of Joan Is Awful, one of the latest episodes of the dystopian Netflix drama Black Mirror.
AI is also affecting the music industry, after the past year has seen a rise in the technology being used to generate “new” tracks from certain singers.
Most notably, an AI-generated “collaboration” between Drake and The Weeknd was pulled from streaming services after going viral back in April.