Bruce Willis ended his forty-year acting career in March after being diagnosed with aphasia and recently reports have surfaced that the Die Hard actor has made a new deal with an AI firm to use his digital double in movies.
Deepcake, a company that creates AI-powered fakes of celebrities, was purported to be working with Willis so that his likeness could be used in movies in the future. However, Willis’ rep told Yahoo Entertainment that the actor has “no partnership or agreement” with it.
Yahoo’s report goes on to state that the actor’s authorised likeness was, in fact, used in August 2021 in a commercial for Russian telecom company MegaFon by Deepcake.
The outlet reports that Willis’ likeness is used all over Deepcake’s website and a quote from the commercial is also featured on it. “I liked the precision of my character. It’s a great opportunity for me to go back in time. The neural network was trained on content of Die Hard and Fifth Element, so my character is similar to the images of that time. With the advent of the modern technology, I could communicate, work and participate in filming, even being on another continent. It’s a brand new and interesting experience for me, and I [am] grateful to our team.”
The 67-year-old actor grew in popularity after appearing in the Emmy Award-winning TV series Moonlighting in the 1980s. He then appeared in the cult classic Die Hard, then going on to play many roles in ‘90s movies such as Pulp Fiction and The Sixth Sense.