Nicolas Cage Cautions Against Actors Using AI: ‘Robots Cannot Reflect the Human Condition’

For Nicolas Cage, using artificial intelligence to manipulate even one second of a performance is just as dangerous as using it to create an entire work from scratch. While accepting an award for his film Dream Scenario at the Saturn Awards, the actor cautioned against compromising creativity by “letting robots dream for us,” noting that he finds the use of AI to be “disturbing.”

“Robots cannot reflect the human condition for us,” Cage said. “That is a dead end if an actor lets one AI robot manipulate his or her performance even a little bit, an inch will eventually become a mile and all integrity, purity, and truth of art will be replaced by financial interests only. We cannot let that happen.”

The speech comes just weeks after Paul McCartney and Elton John issued their own warnings against a potential copyright law that would allow AI to train on artists’ work. During his speech, Cage recognized the threat of AI as a broader problem that exists across mediums.

“The job of all art in my view, film performance included, is to hold a mirror to the external and internal stories of the human condition through the very human thoughtful and emotional process of recreation,” he continued. “A robot cannot do that. If we let robots do that, it will lack all heart and eventually lose edge and turn to mush. There will be no human response to life as we know it. It will be life as robots tell us to know it.”

The caution against using AI also follows backlash to Brady Corbet’s Academy Award-nominated film The Brutalist. The film’s editor Dávid Jancsó recently admitted to using AI in the film to render a “series of architectural drawings and finished buildings” in addition to enhancing Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’ Hungarian dialogue to sound more authentic. The editor maintained that “there’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn’t been done before,” per Variety.

In 2022, Cage starred in the film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which used AI to create a template of the actor’s face in order to make him look younger on screen. “We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with,” Jancsó said. “We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn’t have the money or the time to shoot.”