Like many creatives, the star of Amazon’s upcoming Spider-Man Noir series Nicolas Cage has some noted fears about the film industry’s use of AI.
Cage expressed his concerns on the subject during a recent interview given to The New Yorker‘s Susan Orlean.
Amidst a wide discussion with Orlean ranging from his excitement towards his leading role in the aforementioned Spider-Man spin-off as a hard-boiled incarnation of Peter Parker to his outlook for the future, Cage was at one point interrupted by his publicist, who interjected to remind the actor of that his next appointment was fast approaching.
“I have to slip out after this to go get a scan done for [Spider-Man Noir], and then also for the movie I’m doing after the show.” he explained to his host. “Two scans in one day!”
Asked as to what each project’s production team were “gonna do” with his scans, Cage, his tone light but carrying a note of resignation, detailed, “Well, they have to put me in a computer and match my eye color and change—I don’t know. They’re just going to steal my body and do whatever they want with it via Digital A.I. God, I hope I’m not A.I. I’m terrified of that. I’ve been very vocal about it.”
From there met by the observation from Orleans that the entire concept was “really scary”, the Oscar-winning actor proceeded to extrapolate his concerns beyond AI’s application in Hollywood and began to ponder on the philosophical implications of such technologies, particularly in terms of artistic integrity and personal legacy.”
“It is,” he agreed. “And it makes me wonder, you know, where will the truth of the artists end up? Is it going to be replaced? Is it going to be transmogrified? Where’s the heartbeat going to be? I mean, what are you going to do with my body and my face when I’m dead? I don’t want you to do anything with it!”
Per Cage himself, this is not the first time the actor has publicly weighed in on the matter.
“Well, first of all, let me say that I don’t want anyone to do anything with my likeness when I’m gone,” the actor told Wired during a November 2023 interview. “Whoever is in charge of my estate will make sure of that. But while I’m alive, if we have an agreement and you want to use [my image] as an art form and I can have some sort of collaboration with it, maybe there’s a conversation there to be had.”
“The most interesting use of AI that I ever read about—and I’m still not entirely sure how it works—but it’s to communicate with other species,” he elaborated. “They were talking about whales and how, if we can put the whale sounds in and correlate and correspond the whale sounds to their actions, that the artificial intelligence would be able to crack the code to their languages and that we could speak with them. That was interesting. But in terms of taking a work of art and appropriating it with a robot? Yeah, that’s not OK in my book.”
Further, as noted above, Cage isn’t the first actor to speak out against the use of AI in filmmaking – after all, the topic has been a major point of industry contention ever since it was first proposed as a solution to last year’s Hollywood guild strikes.
Likewise, pressed during a 2023 interview with Wired for his thoughts on the concept of AI deepfakes, John Wick star Keanu Reeves asserted, “What’s frustrating about that is you lose your agency.”
“When you give a performance in a film, you know you’re going to be edited, but you’re participating in that,” he continued. “If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view. That’s scary. It’s going to be interesting to see how humans deal with these technologies. They’re having such cultural, sociological impacts, and the species is being studied. There’s so much ‘data’ on behaviors now. Technologies are finding places in our education, in our medicine, in our entertainment, in our politics, and how we war and how we work.”
Pacific Rim director Guillermo del Toro also had some choice words about AI in filmmaking, telling attendees of his keynote address at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival, “If anyone wants movies made by AI, let them get it immediately. I don’t care about people who want to be fulfilled and get something sh–ty, quickly.”
“Otherwise, why not buy a printer, print the Mona Lisa, and say you made it?” he added.
