Name: Tom Hanks.
Age: 66.
Appearance: Forever on our screens.
Yes, we’ll always have Splash. Not to mention all the other films.
Of course: Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Turner & Hooch. And don’t forget about all the films still to come.
God willing, there will be plenty more. There’s no God about it. Hanks will be in films long after he is dead.
Yes, but that’s how films work. No, I mean that he will continue to star in films made after his death.
Who says? Hanks says.
He is a good actor, but I think he might be overestimating his powers with that claim. He wasn’t speaking about his immortality, but about the awesome implications of AI.
Oh God, AI. I’ve been ignoring it for months; why hasn’t it gone away yet? Because it’s busy being everywhere, changing everything, for ever. “I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it,” said Hanks on the Adam Buxton podcast, “but performances can go on and on and on and on.”
Forgive me, but what does Hanks know about AI? In January, he and the director Robert Zemeckis announced a film called Here, in which deepfake technology will allow the actors to transform into younger versions of themselves.
I get it, AI is the future. According to Hanks, it’s the present. “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,” he said.
The old man is finally catching on. Actually, Hanks claims to have first grasped the implications of AI when he and Zemeckis made the CGI film The Polar Express in 2004.
I suppose he must have a better-than-basic understanding of the technology. “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,” he said.
OK, barely a basic understanding. He seems more focused on the legal ramifications of “my face and my voice and everybody else’s being our intellectual property”.
To be honest, I think that’s a Hanks problem. Nobody’s going to be putting my face in a movie after I’m dead. Not a good movie, anyway.
Do say: “With AI technology advancing rapidly, we hope that one day soon we’ll be able to address the tragic shortage of Tom Hanks films.”
Don’t say: “Another terrible performance from Tom Hanks. May he rest in peace.”
