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.
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.
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.
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.
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.