(CNN/KDKA) — Actor Tom Hanks believes he could continue to appear in new movies after his death thanks to the power of artificial intelligence (AI).
“Which is a good chance right now if I wanted to, [is] I could get together and do a series of seven movies starring me in them, where I’d be 32 years old from now until kingdom come,” Hanks said on the latest episode of “The Adam Buxton Podcast,” released on Saturday.
“Anyone can now recreate themselves at whatever age they are through artificial intelligence or deep fake technology… I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but my performances can go on and on,” added the Oscar-winning actor. .
“Other than understanding that it’s done by artificial intelligence or deeply fake, there’s not going to be anything that tells you that it’s not just me and me and that it’s going to have some degree of realistic quality.”
Buxton then suggested that people could tell the difference between AI Hanks and the real version.
While Hanks, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Fred Rogers in “A beautiful day in the neighborhood,” he acknowledged that an AI version of himself wouldn’t be able to produce the same performances as he does now, wondering if audiences would really mind him.
“No doubt people will be able to tell, but the question is, will they care?” he said. “There are some people who won’t care, who won’t make that delineation.”
The task of creating an AI Hanks would be made easier as his likeness and movements were captured for use in the 2004 film “The Polar Express,” he said.
“That was always persistent,” Hanks said. “The first time we made a movie that had a huge amount of our own data locked into a computer — literally what we looked like — was a movie called ‘The Polar Express.’
“We saw this coming, we saw that there would be this ability to take zeroes and ones inside a computer and turn it into a person and a character. Now, that’s only gone up a billion since then, and we’re seeing it everywhere.”
Hanks also said that advances in artificial intelligence are encouraging film agents to draw up contracts to protect actors’ likenesses as intellectual property.
“I can tell you that there [are] Discussions are taking place in all the guilds, all the agencies and all the law firms to come up with the legal ramifications of my face and voice and everyone else’s being our intellectual property,” he said.
Hanks is currently promoting his debut novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.
According to the official synopsis, the book is based on “a wildly ambitious story of the making of a colossal, star-studded, multi-million dollar superhero action movie and the humble comic book that inspired it all.”
Some of the initial reviews of the book were mixed, but Hanks accepts the criticism.
In an interview with the BBC he explained why he took on the project. “Sometimes you just have to have another reason to fire your imagination,” he said, adding that his novel “will live and die by its own ability to entertain and enlighten an audience.”
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