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Artificial intelligence (AI) is simultaneously amazing and terrifying the world these days.
While the advances that have been made thus far in AI are exciting and quite often very useful, the future of artificial intelligence scares the bejeezus out of many people. (Rightfully so.)
How AI will be utilized down the road is something that is on a lot of people’s minds, including that of America’s dad Tom Hanks.
“This has always been lingering,” Hanks recently told The Adam Buxton Podcast. “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.”
“We saw this coming. 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 billion-fold since then and we see it everywhere.”
“What is a bona fide possibility right now, 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.
“Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deep fake technology … I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but my performances can go on and on and on,” the Oscar-winning actor added.
“Outside of the understanding that it’s been done by AI or deep fake, 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.”
Of course, Polar Express was done using motion capture. Using artificial intelligence to put a dead person in a film is a whole different ball of wax.
“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 in order to come up with the legal ramifications of my face and my voice and everybody else’s being our intellectual property,” Hanks added.
He also wondered if it would even bother movie fans would if it wasn’t really him on the screen.
“The question is will they care? There are some people that won’t care, that won’t make that delineation,” he said. (Based on these numbers, he is probably not wrong.)
Will you care? Does it even matter? Heck, according to some Tom Hanks is already dead.
There’s also the theory that the entireinternet is fake and being run by artificial intelligence. So this entire article could be fiction.
Shoot, AI may have already taken over the world and we don’t even know it!
A fake Tom Hanks on a movie screen in the future is probably one of the least of our problems.