Hollywood’s favorite everyman wants you to know that he’s not selling dental insurance—or, at least, his flesh-and-blood version isn’t. Tom Hanks took to Instagram on Sunday to warn the world that there’s an AI deepfaked version of him being used in advertisements without his consent. “BEWARE!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me,” Hanks wrote in the post. “I have nothing to do with it.” The Forrest Gump actor included a screenshot of the advertisement that looks uncannily like Hanks—though much less creepy than the motion capture characters he did for The Polar Express. While cheeky, the incident does underscore the big hairy issue of AI being used to replicate the likeness of actors without their permission—something that SAG-AFTRA actors are fighting against amidst their strike and contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
