Tom Hanks

The Toy Story star may be accustomed to lending his voice to animation, but he was caught off guard when an AI-generated version of Tom Hanks appeared in a promotional video for a dental practice without his consent.

Addressing his millions of Instagram followers, he wrote: “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 has been vocal about the risks posed by artificial intelligence, previously condemning its use ahead of the Hollywood writers’ strike and warning that emerging technology threatens to replace creative jobs. He argued that the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) had long anticipated this moment.

He said: “We saw this coming. We saw that there was going to be this ability to take zeros and ones inside a computer and turn it into a face and a character. Now that has only grown a billionfold since then, and we see it everywhere.

“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 to come up with the legal ramifications of my face and my voice — and everybody else’s — being our intellectual property.”