Tom Hanks Raises Concerns About AI Vocal Likeness

In an Entertainment Weekly interview, reported by TheWrap and Variety, Tom Hanks said it is "scary" to imagine studios reusing past recordings to synthesize his voice. "Time is undefeated," he said, adding: "The question would be whether or not we could cobble together some version of me. Every word we have ever recorded in time in 'Toy Story' is on digital media somewhere, so they could put together anything they would want." Hanks and Tim Allen, the voice of Buzz Lightyear, both called the prospect of an AI-generated sequel "a scary thought." Toy Story 5 opened at $160 million domestically and $312 million globally, per TheWrap, which also reports director Andrew Stanton saying the fifth film is likely the franchise's final installment.

Variety notes Hanks raised this concern in a 2023 Adam Buxton Podcast interview, saying anyone can now be recreated "at any age" via AI or deepfake technology, and pointing to The Polar Express (2004) as an early case of actor data being captured and stored for future performance recreation. TechRadar and Futurism also picked up the new remarks, a sign of how far beyond the trade press this concern now travels.

Modern voice cloning pipelines combine speaker embeddings, prosody-aware text-to-speech models, and large speech datasets; clean, isolated, professionally recorded dialogue, exactly the asset a long-running animated franchise accumulates, is far better training material than found audio. The available controls are contractual and procedural rather than technical: consent clauses, provenance tracking, and licensing frameworks, implemented unevenly across studios and talent unions.

Any studio or guild guidance specifically covering reuse of archival audio; contract language on voice synthesis in new film and game agreements; and progress on watermarking and consent-capture tooling. Statements from performers of this profile have historically preceded, and accelerated, formal standard-setting.