Nicolas Cage admits he is 'terrified' of AI: 'What are you going to do with my face when I’m dead?'

Nicolas Cage is joining the chorus of actors who are nervous about the rise of artificial intelligence in Hollywood.

The Longlegs actor voiced his reservations about AI to the New Yorker, during a conversation with The Orchid Thief author Susan Orlean. After sharing that he was scheduled for a “scan” for his upcoming Spider-Man Noir live-action series, Cage worried aloud about how his likeness could be manipulated by the increasingly popular technology.

“They have to put me in a computer and match my eye color and change—I don’t know,” he said of the upcoming scan, before joking, “They’re just going to steal my body and do whatever they want with it via digital AI.”

Once the idea was spoken aloud, Cage seemed less amused. “God, I hope not AI. I’m terrified of that,” he said. “I’ve been very vocal about it.”

He continued, “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!"

Cage is no stranger to witnessing how technology can alter a performance. After audiences got to see his cameo as Superman in last year’s The Flash, the actor revealed that his scene in the film wasn’t the one that he filmed.

"When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider. I did not do that," Cage told Yahoo Entertainment. "That was not what I did."

He explained that the scene he filmed saw Kal-El "bearing witness [to] the end of a universe," and added, "I had no dialogue [so had to] convey with my eyes the emotion. So that's what I did. I was on set for maybe three hours."

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In recent years, AI has been a controversial topic amongst those in Hollywood. Its implementation, especially "generative AI," was one of the most divisive issues on the table when it came to settling the latest SAG-AFTRA contract after a 118 day strike.

Several of Hollywood’s biggest stars have been outspoken over their fear of AI being utilized by studios. Last year, Cage’s Con Air costar John Cusack called AI a “criminal enterprise” while slamming its use as studio greed.

"Studios wanna have extras work one day, scan them - own their likeness forever - and eliminate them from the business," Cusack wrote as part of a series of social media posts on the subject. "And do you think they will stop with extras? That's what AI is - a giant copywrite identity theft - criminal Enterprise. 'We had no idea this would happen!' they will say in 10 years when the scope and scale of the plunder is revealed. Of course they did - it's the business model.”