Tom Hanks' terminal technocracy

I accidentally watched a film with Tom Hanks in it last night. Accidentally, because I've heard all the same rumours about him as everyone else, and I certainly wouldn't be surprised if they were true. I never warmed to him as a child, despite his ubiquitous celluloid presence in childhood staple films, and subsequent unfair domination of the '80s body-swap genre. For my money, Judge Reinhold in Vice Versa gave the far more persuasive performance, and, as far as I know, there are no enduring rumours he is a predatory paedophile (he almost certainly isn't, because the film flopped, his career never took off, and nobody's heard of him since).

So I would ordinarily completely avoid watching films with Hanks in them purely on principle, but yesterday, I began watching the recently released, 'Here', not realising Hanks had a starring role.

And when I say "Hanks", I mean his computer-generated AI image.

This is not mere idle, conspiratorial speculation, but confirmed - rather ostentatiously by the film's producers - as fact.

Director Robert Zemeckis is very keen to let us know about the rad new technological advances that allowed him to make a film that "you couldn't have made three years ago".

He and fellow producers proudly acknowledge they used AI to distort the age and appearance of two of the main characters, Hanks and his onscreen wife, played by Robin Wright. The couple appear on film first as teenagers, and then the audience watches as they visibly age through parenthood, middle-age, and finally into white-haired and frail pensioners.

Explaining how this was done, Wired magazine reported:

"Metaphysic developed the facial modification system by training custom machine-learning models on frames of Hanks' and Wright's previous films. This included a large dataset of facial movements, skin textures, and appearances under varied lighting conditions and camera angles. The resulting models can generate instant face transformations without the months of manual post-production work traditional CGI requires."

The question we must ask, therefore, is that if Hollywood has the technology to make a 68-year-old Tom Hanks appear as a teenager, then how do we know it doesn't have the technology to artificially resurrect a dead Tom Hanks to posthumously appear in films?

In fact, Hollywood does have this technology, as confirmed by the actor Robert Downey Jr., who is so worried about being digitally reconstructed in a film after his death that he has put a specific clause in his will instructing his estate to sue should this ever occur.

Downey's fears are far from unfounded, as a New York Times reporter discovered when he visited the headquarters of Metaphysic, the Hollywood visual-effects start-up that uses artificial intelligence to create digital renderings of the human face, and that was responsible for the AI performances in 'Here'.

In seconds, the NYT reporter found himself transformed by Metaphysic AI into a "famous actor". He writes of the experience:

"Ulbrich clickety-clicked on his laptop for a moment, and my face on the screen was transmogrified. “Smile,” he said to me. “Do you recognize that face?” I did, right away, but I can’t disclose its owner, because the actor’s project won’t come out until 2025, and the role is still top secret. Suffice it to say that the face belonged to a major star with fantastic teeth. “Smile again,” Ulbrich said. I complied. “Those aren’t your teeth.” Indeed, the teeth belonged to Famous Actor. The synthesis was seamless and immediate, as if a digital mask had been pulled over my face that matched my expressions, with almost no lag time."

In other words, any random person can perform a role on a screen, and then the face of a famous thespian - alive or dead - can be superimposed on top, and we the audience would never know.

So, how do we know it was really Tom Hanks starring in 'Here', and not simply his image projected onto someone else?

How do we know - as was widely rumoured a few years ago - that Tom Hanks is not in fact dead, his face technologically resurrected, so filmmakers can capitalise on his star power, without having to pay him a penny?

Note that, despite its technical ambition, 'Here' cost just $50 million to make (less than a quarter of some Marvel movie budgets), which is most intriguing, given that Hanks alone can command up to $70 million per film.

Even if he worked for his reported "baseline" salary of $25 million, it's still very difficult to imagine all the other production costs for such an ambitious project could have been met with the remaining $25 million. The maths make far more sense if Hanks wasn't actually paid anything, because he wasn't really in it.

So, the fact is that we don't know if Hanks remains alive, and we can't know, because - as we enter this terrifying new technological age of artificiality - we can now never know for sure if a person on a screen is really who they purport to be, or even real at all.

We have been primed for this dystopian new unreality for a while, going back to Channel 4's "Deepfake Queen"; said Queen projecting a holographic image of herself into a carriage; and, most recently, the political party Reform allegedly using AI candidates in the General Election.

We have also been given a very clear and explicit message about the future of Hollywood actors as real people in the form of their opulent mansions and luxury lifestyles literally going up in flames.

As I wrote at the time:

"Hollywood and its celebrities have done their job and now the system that made them intends to comprehensively, humiliatingly break them, by taking everything away - their pedestal, their reputation, their riches, their homes - because it doesn't need them any more. That's what we're seeing here.

But why doesn't it? When people are more in thrall to their screens than ever, surely actors have more influential star power than ever before?

Yes, they do, and to the control-freak psychopaths behind the scenes, allowing mere mortals to have that level of power and influence is a problem, because what if they go off-script?

No matter how much you attempt to control someone, no matter how much you threaten or bribe them, no matter even if you subject them to military-grade mind-control programmes, they're still human and they can slip up.

MK Ultra programming, for example, can and does break down as people age, due to natural neurological changes in the brain (see Britney Spears and Amanda Bynes for two recent, very public examples).

Alternatively or additionally, people's consciences can get the better of them, and they can speak up about some of the darkest secrets lurking behind Hollywood's glittering facade - see Isaac Kappy (who the ruling classes then had to go to the trouble of suiciding).

The point is that people are never completely controllable, and when they wield the enormous power and influence a top Hollywood celebrity does, it really would be vastly preferable to their masters and handlers that they were.

So how to get around this?

Look closely - Ricky Gervais gave us big clues in his speech. He said, Hollywood actors are basically useless now, they're just glorified body-builders and junkies. Netflix (and similar streaming services) are the future.

Now, look at one of Netflix's most popular and most revealing shows, Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror.

Black Mirror is to the Netflix generation what Brave New World was to readers of its day (and just in case you were in any doubt about that, Charlie Brooker even named his son 'Huxley').

It's telling us.

Brooker is saying, just as Huxley was, "I'm an insider, I've seen the blueprints, and I know the plans. Here's what's coming."

Many of Black Mirror's "predictions" (revelations) have already come true, such as the social credit scoring system depicted on the episode Nosedive, which we now have with services such as Uber (where both driver and passenger give each other a star score out of five, just as is portrayed in the show).

What else did Black Mirror "predict"?

See the episode Joan Is Awful.

In this episode, a woman's life is automatically generated into a televised show using CGI and deepfake technology.

In other words, an entirely persuasive and realistic TV series is produced using no actual human beings in the acting roles.

Commenting on the episode, creator Brooker said the entertainment industry was considering a future of "automatically generated entertainment that is endlessly targeted directly at individuals".

The episode came out just before the launch of ChatGPT, and Brooker said he was "happy with the episode's timeliness".

I bet he was.

What we are therefore being prepared for - with the rise of ChatGPT and CGI, and the simultaneous demise of Hollywood, its iconic legends, and their homes - is a future where the "reality" presented to us via our screens is not merely fictitious or fabricated, insofar as it is being scripted by writers and performed by actors, but that it is entirely unreal and fake, consisting solely of AI-generated lies delivered by CGI illusions."

That's the inevitable future of TV and film, and 'Here' is one of the first examples of this being explicitly revealed to the public.

If the public uncomplainingly accepts the use of AI to "de-age people" - as it appears the public has - then it's not a massive leap for them to accept the same technology being used to "de-dead" people: bringing expired screen icons back to "life" for future roles.

From there, it's really no stretch at all to having entirely AI actors, who have never been alive, becoming the beloved celluloid stars of the future.

As I mentioned in the italicised paragraphs above, real human beings create a lot of work and hassle for the ruling classes, and they often go off-script and say the wrong thing.

No such danger with AI stars, and, therefore, the desired programming and social engineering can be delivered seamlessly, as was the case with 'Here'.

Ostensibly a heart-warming, poignant reflection on family ties, the passage of time, and changing social mores, what the film actually was (what all big-budget, star-studded productions are) was the usual communist agitprop pushing fake plagues, broken families, and racial tensions.

The film charts the lives of a number of families who all live in the same home at different times over a century. All but one of the families have children, and all but one of the families are shown struggling for money and miserable (the childless couple, meanwhile, are fabulously wealthy and deliriously happy).

Although the main family - headed by the Hanks character - starts off close and tight-knit, by the final scenes, Hanks is living alone and states that the family "is scattered all over the world".

The final family to inhabit the home, a black family, are shown anxiously instructing their teenaged son how to speak to a police officer if ever he is pulled over whilst driving, to ensure that the crazed irrational white man doesn't suddenly snap and kill him for no reason.

Furthermore, and perhaps most insidiously of all, three different "pandemics" are woven into the story: the Spanish 'flu (which kills one of the characters), the Great Plague, and - but of course! - Covid.

The film shows us the housekeeper for the final family (the black family, who are portrayed as oppressed, yet they are the only ones to have a housekeeper) spraying an air freshener around. She then sniffs it, and notices with alarm she can't smell the fragrance... Then in the next scene she has died.

("Of Covid", is the implication, rather than of air freshener, even though the latter is infinitely more toxic than a fake cold.)

Given the ostensible story arc of the film - showing us the evolution of family structures and values over time, as represented through the microcosm of the family home - there was clearly no need to insert "plague" fearmongering into it, given that all other notable world events are conspicuous by their absence.

No need, that is, until you realise that Hollywood is one major mechanism - if not the major mechanism - for making people believe in plagues at all.

If we hadn't all been marinaded in movies like Outbreak and Contagion all our lives, the idea of a microscopic and unalive, yet infinitely evil and scheming, invisible enemy that leaps from host to host to kill us all, would seem ludicrous (and it is). So we have to be relentlessly reminded by Hollywood fakery that this really is a thing...

And how better to spread fakery than with fakes?

Note, also, that this AI fakery won't be restricted to Hollywood and movie stars, but, increasingly, will encroach into everyday life involving ordinary people, too.

Already, anybody who wants one can purchase an ominously monikered "AI twin".

An AI twin is described as:

"A virtual version of yourself, that you can generate using Captions, and use to create talking videos. Your AI Twin will look and sound just like you, and you can save it to the Captions app to easily generate video content in a tap. Instantly create videos as yourself, looking your best, in 29 languages."

An AI twin is in effect an avatar that you can use for podcasts, video chatting, and even online work conferences. It is created to look and sound just like you, so nobody would ever know that it wasn't.

Until, that is, you inevitably start tweaking it... smoothing out a few features... erasing the odd wrinkle, changing your hair... "de-ageing" your creation, just as is done to Tom Hanks in 'Here'.

Before long, your AI twin would barely resemble you at all, and would be an "idealised" (i.e., fake) version of you, interacting with other people's "idealised" (fake) versions of them, all within the fake virtual metaverse, insulated entirely away from the outside (real) world... a diabolical dystopian future that was clearly depicted in the predictive programming vehicle, Ready Player One.

This intended future has already been repeatedly reaffirmed by various sinister tech billionaires, including Marc Andressen, inventor of one of the world's first internet browsers, who said:

"The vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world."

WEF goblin, Yuval Noah Harari, agrees, declaring:

"The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support people even without any effort from their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside."

Simply the types of people championing AI and virtual worlds is enough to make it unambiguously clear that these "advances" are not in our interests, and that we must do everything possible to avoid being subsumed by them.

Whenever people ask me what the solution is to all the unrelenting evil in the world, the first thing I always say is: get off your screens. Go out into the real world and meet people in person. Attend events, network, develop communities where you live and not just with strangers online - with no offence meant to strangers online, many of whom are fine people, and can certainly become real-world friends... but the urgency to get off the internet and meet in person ASAP has never been more acute.

In the quaint and, already, almost anachronistic days of the 'catfish', a simple Zoom chat was enough to verify that the person you were talking to online really was the person they said they were.

In the age of AI, that is no longer the case.

Tellingly, the New York Times article exploring uses of AI in "Here" assures us that the real Tom Hanks is alive and well, which the reporter knows... because he talked to him on Zoom.

In this digital exchange, the "real" Hanks acknowledges AI advances mean that Hollywood can "go off and make movies starring me for the next 122 years if they want.”

"So how do we know you're not AI?", some readers may, quite sensibly, enquire of me at this point - so I hope some of my regular commentators who have met me in person can confirm otherwise in the comments... especially the one who said I was taller than they expected, which rather pleased me, as I always felt by rights I should be slightly more elongated than I am (if I ever get an AI twin, it will be...) (just kidding! I would actually make the thing hobble around in huge heels to punish it).

George Orwell once famously said, "in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act".

Less famously, Miri AF now says, "in a time of universal AI, living in reality is a revolutionary act".

Though please do be sure to share my internet page with all those whom you meet there..!

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