Tom Hanks Has a Pretty Eerie Prediction for the Future of Hollywood

The music industry has been wrestling with the existential conundrum that is AI recently, from fake Drake releases to Grimes encouraging fans to make tracks of her voice with the technology. Now it's time for Hollywood to reckon with its terrifying potential, as Tom Hanks has suggested that film execs will soon be able to cast actors to star in movies well after they've kicked the bucket.

Speaking on The Adam Buxton Podcast, Hanks said that the idea had first crossed his mind when he was filming on the digital motion-capture animation film The Polar Express, back in 2004 (which many people found creepy at the time, thanks to the dead-eyed characters): “This has always been lingering. 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 The Polar Express.

“We saw this coming, we saw that there was going to be this ability to take zeros and ones from inside a computer and turn it into a face and a character. That has only grown a billion-fold since then and we see it everywhere.”

He went further to explain: “What is a bona fide possibility right now is, 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 performances can go on and on and on and on.

“Outside the understanding of AI and deep fake, there'll be nothing to tell you that it's not me and me alone.”

There’s two things the entertainment industry are scratching their heads about now: should you do it, and if so, how do you regulate it? Hanks also had some thoughts on this digital minefield: “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…That's certainly an artistic challenge but it's also a legal one.”

From: Esquire UK