Actor, who has previously expressed concerns about use of AI in film, tells fans ‘I have nothing to do’ with hoax video

Tom Hanks has warned fans that an ad for a dental plan that appears to use his image is in fact fake and was created using artificial intelligence.

In a message posted to his 9.5 million Instagram followers, the actor said his image was used without his permission. “BEWARE!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it,” Hanks wrote over a screenshot of a computer-generated image of himself from the clip.

The Oscar winner has expressed concerns in the past about the use of AI in film and TV, although he has not shied away from approving digitally altered versions of himself in film.

  • DrM@feddit.de
    49·
    1 year ago

    Yes, the technology exists. No, it’s not a threat for your grandma. Scammers would first need need to know which phone number is your grandmas, them they need to find out the relatives of your grandma, obtain enough sample data from your voice and train an AI model for at least a few hours to imitate your voice. That’s not a realistic scenario to do for a slim chance of getting a few thousand bucks. This kind of social engineering attack is only viable for very rich persons and businesses.

    • flossdaily@lemmy.world
      16·
      1 year ago

      I’m sorry, but your assessment of how difficult that would be is WAAAAAY off.

      Scammers are already doing stuff like this en masse with highly customized email scams.

      The way this scam would work is to start with YouTubers, where grabbing the voice data is easy. Then you find their Facebook profile… Very easy, since people use the same usernames, or they go out of their way to link their profiles.

      It’s a pretty easy step to make friend requests with those people. And then a very easy leap to find their relatives real names and towns through their Facebook connections.

      Now you take their connections and towns and do reverse phone number lookups.

      ALL of this can be automated. Every step.

      The voice cloning and gpt-powered phone calls can be automated now, too.

      The only reason this isn’t happening at scale is that scammers haven’t had enough time to adapt yet.

      • guacupado@lemmy.world
        12·
        1 year ago

        It’s weird you talk about how easy it is but your only example is with very public people where all you need is a Google search to get their info.

        • deeroh@lemmy.sdf.org
          4·
          1 year ago

          I’d guess that most people with public social media accounts would be susceptible to something like this. As long as there are videos available with the person speaking, which are plentiful by way of instagram reels / tiktoks, the rest of what the commenter described above sounds totally feasible.

        • flossdaily@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          You don’t need another example if you understand how many people are covered in that category.

          Do you have any idea how many people have at least 5 minutes of audio on YouTube? (That’s all you need for voice cloning), tens of millions? Hundreds of millions?.. And how many of them have a Facebook, insta, tic Tok, or Twitter account? Virtually all of them.

          If you wrote a script to do what I outlined, it would run FOREVER, because he users would be signing up and making videos faster than this script could ever hope to keep up.

    • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1·
      1 year ago

      People are reaaally downvoting you, but how would someone call my G-Ma and imitate my voice using AI?! My voice isn’t on the internet. That’s an insane thing to fear for any regular person.