Nicolas Cage reiterates concerns about AI: “I’m terrified”
Hollywood icon Nicolas Cage has once again addressed his fears surrounding artificial intelligence in the arts, admitting he’s “terrified” of its possible capabilities.
Over the last two years, the debate surrounding AI particularly in the movie industry has been non-stop, with actors fearful they will be deemed surplus to requirements due to technological advancements. This worry played a major role in the Hollywood strikes throughout 2023 as actors demonstrated their power by bringing productions to a halt for the greater, longterm good.
While artificial intelligence has already started to make its way into the film industry and has helped lower production costs, actors remain invaluable, but Cage is aware that this may not continue to be the case forever.
Cage’s latest comments arise after James Hawes, the director of Apple TV’s Slow Horses, warned that an AI-generated programme is an inevitablity, stating: “The best guess was three to five years. Someone will say, ‘Create a scene in an ER room where a doctor comes in and he’s having an affair with a woman, and they’re flirting, and someone is dying on the table,’ and [AI] will start to create it.”
In 2023, when the AI debate reached fever pitch, Cage first expressed his anxieties, telling Yahoo, “AI is a nightmare to me. It’s inhumane. You can’t get more inhumane than artificial intelligence.”
Now, in a new conversation with The New Yorker, Cage expanded upon his comments, and further detailed his issue. After revealing he had to “slip out after this to go get a scan done for the show, and then also for the movie I’m doing after the show”, the actor explained how the two scans were for AI purposes.
He continued: “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 not A.I. I’m terrified of that. I’ve been very vocal about it.”
Cage then spoke in dystopian terms about AI, adding, “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!”
While Cage is understandably worried about what the future holds for creatives, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos recently tried to play down talk that AI was set to take over. He remarked: “AI is not going to take your job. The person who uses AI well might take your job.”
The Netflix boss also described AI as a “natural kind of advancement of things that are happening in the creative space today”, suggesting the platform would have no qualms to use the technology if it would enhance the product.
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