What is even real anymore? Well, we may never know since the ability to distort reality has now taken a massive leap with deepfake technology.

Tom Hanks took to Instagram this weekend to warn his fans about some sketchy entity using his AI-generated likeness to push a dental plan.

“BEWARE!!” Hanks wrote in an Instagram post. “There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it.”

But how do we know that the real Hanks is not the one in the dental plan video? What if the real Hanks is the deepfake and the fake Hanks is the real Hanks?

As time goes on, these questions may never be answered.

Hanks had also previously discussed some ramifications regarding the rise in deepfake technology, saying on an episode of “The Adam Buxton Podcast” that it’s now possible for him to continue acting after his death, according to Variety.

“Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deep fake technology. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but performances can go on and on and on and on,” Hanks said. “Outside the understanding of AI and deepfake, there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone. And it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality. That’s certainly an artistic challenge but it’s also a legal one.”

He added, “Without a doubt, people will be able to tell [that it’s AI], but the question is will they care? There are some people that won’t care, that won’t make that delineation.”

But Hanks is not the only celebrity battling these sorts of cybercriminals.

On Monday, YouTuber Mr. Beast notified his followers that he had been the victim of a similar scheme.

“Lots of people are getting this deepfake scam ad of me… are social media platforms ready to handle the rise of AI deepfakes? This is a serious problem,” he wrote on X.

Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda Williams also spoke out this week against recreations of her late father made with artificial intelligence that she said are “disturbing.”

“These recreations are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people, but at their worst, a horrendous Frankensteinian monster, cobbled together from the worst bits of everything this industry is, instead of what it should stand for," she said.

According to the Daily Mail, celebrity deep fake porn has almost doubled in a year and a raft of high-profile female stars, including Taylor Swift, Natalie Portman, and Emma Watson, have already had their images manipulated by technology to make them appear in pornographic content.

It appears that we now live in a time where people can very easily distort reality and make recordings of people saying and doing things that never happened.

Anyone can essentially do something very extreme to weaponize fake information. Propaganda will reach a level that you could not even imagine.

Not only will it be used to fake information, but now people can essentially deny things they have said and done and blame it on deepfakes.

Would this eventually treat video and photo evidence as the same level of polygraph tests in courts?

Do you think deepfakes will finally be the all-end mass propaganda campaign to take control of the masses?

Or are the fears overblown? Is this just another evolutionary step in our futuristic world that people can use to expand their creativity with a digital avatar?

At the very least, deepfakes may be more sophisticated than we realize.

But are we forced to just accept this new synthetic reality?