The A-list Hollywood star Tom Hanks is speaking out this week to say that he will continue starring in movies after he passes away using artificial intelligence.
Hanks Discusses AI In Hollywood
While appearing on “The Adam Buxton Podcast,” Hanks explained that AI has always been lingering in the world of Hollywood, adding that it was used on his 2004 children’s film The Polar Express.
“The first time we did a movie that had a huge amount of our own data locked in a computer, literally what we looked like, was a movie called The Polar Express,” said Hanks, 66. “And we saw this coming. We saw that there was going to be this ability to take 0s and 1s inside a computer and turn it into a face and a character.”
“Now, that is only grown a billion-fold since then, and we see it everywhere,” he continued. “And I can tell you that there is discussions going on in all of the guilds, all of the agencies and all of legal firms in order to come up with the legal ramifications of my face and my voice – and everybody else’s – being our intellectual property.”
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‘My Performances Can Go On’ After Death
Hanks went on to talk about how AI could be used by him specifically.
“If I wanted to, I could get together and pitch a series of seven movies that would star me in them in which I would be 32 years old, from now until kingdom come,” he stated. “Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deepfake technology.”
“Because, look, I could be hit by a bus tomorrow, and that’s it, but my performances can go on and on and on and on, and outside the understanding that it’s been done with AI or deepfake, there will be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone,” he added. “And it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality. And that certainly is an artistic challenge, but it’s also a legal one.”
While Hanks believes that audiences will always be able to tell the difference between an AI performance and a real one, he questions how many people will care at the end of the day.
“There are some people that won’t care, that won’t make that delineation,” Hanks said. “This is a super attenuated version of that printing press. AI, deepfake, anything will be able to lie just as well as they can go ahead [and] be able [to] tell the truth. … Some people that are going to … put [a] huge stake in what is authentic and what is not. Just as there’s going to be a ton of people that ain’t going to care.”
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AI Designer’s Chilling Warning
This comes weeks after Geoffrey Hinton, who has been called the “Godfather of AI,” left his role at Google so that he could warn the rules of the “dangers” of the very technology that he helped to design.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton told the New York Times.
“AI is a fantastic technology – it’s causing great advances in medicine, in the development of new materials, in forecasting earthquakes or floods… [but we] need a lot of work to understand how to contain AI,” he added earlier this week, according to Fox Business. “There’s no use waiting for the AI to outsmart us; we must control it as it develops. We also have to understand how to contain it, how to avoid its negative consequences.”
We are truly living in some crazy times, and it would be easy to see how technology like AI would get out of hand. In the end, only time will tell if Hanks is right about where all of this is going when it comes to Hollywood and AI.
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