Tom Hanks
Actor
America’s most trusted movie star has become a serial target of AI scam ads using his face — and a public advocate for performers’ rights over their digital likenesses, warning that AI performances “can go on and on and on.”
In his words
BEWARE!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it.
I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but my performances can go on and on and on.
Biography
Tom Hanks (born 1956) is a two-time Academy Award winner — for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump — and for three decades has been shorthand for on-screen trustworthiness. That trust is exactly what makes his face valuable to scammers, and it has put him on the front line of the deepfake era.
Fighting the AI clones
In May 2023, on The Adam Buxton Podcast, Hanks predicted that AI and deepfake technology would let actors — including dead ones — keep performing indefinitely, calling it both an artistic and a legal challenge: outside of being told it was synthetic, “there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone.” Months later the prediction turned personal: in October 2023 he warned his Instagram followers that a dental-plan ad was circulating with an unauthorized “AI version of me,” and he has since repeatedly disavowed AI fakes of himself hawking products to fans.
Hanks spoke as SAG-AFTRA was striking in part over AI likeness rights, and Fortune noted he had been sounding the alarm before it was fashionable — “we saw this coming.” His concern is less about the tools than about consent and fraud: a career built on audience trust, strip-mined by anyone with a video generator.
Notably, Hanks is no technophobe — he has embraced digital de-aging in projects like Robert Zemeckis’s Here (2024), which used AI-driven tools with his participation. The line he draws is authorization, not technology.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/tom-hanks