Nicolas Cage decries AI manipulation of actors' performances

Nicolas Cage accepted the honor for best actor in a film at the Saturn Awards on Sunday, using his speech to honor late collaborator David Lynch and to praise his Dream Scenario director Kristoffer Borgli. Dream Scenario is one of Cage's "favorite movies" he's ever made, thanks to "this incredibly disturbing but hilarious world that [Borgli] dreamt up," he said (via Variety). "But there is another world that is also disturbing me. It’s happening right now around all of us: the new AI world," Cage warned. 

"I am a big believer in not letting robots dream for us. Robots cannot reflect the human condition for us. 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 can’t let that happen," the actor said. "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. A robot can’t 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."

Cage's speech comes amidst major conversation about AI during the 2025 awards season. Last month, it came to light that Best Picture contenders Emilia Perez and The Brutalist used AI-assisted voice cloning technology on the voices of their actors. In the case of Emilia Perez, it was to improve Karla Sofia Gascon's singing voice; for Brutalist, to improve the actors' Hungarian dialogue. As pundits discoursed about whether the use of AI was disqualifying, particularly for Adrien Brody's Best Actor Oscar campaign, director Brady Corbet released a statement in support of his performers. "Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed," he said. "This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production. The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them and done with the utmost respect for the craft."

Cage has been sounding alarms even before the awards-season shakeup. In his own words, he's been "very vocal" about his concerns regarding artificial intelligence in the entertainment industry. In an interview with The New Yorker in July 2024, he professed himself "terrified" of the technology: "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!" And previously, in November 2023, he said, "AI is a nightmare to me. It’s inhumane. You can’t get more inhumane than artificial intelligence."

Cage is far from the only artist against AI, but it seems he'll be on the forefront of the movement against AI in cinema. As he told the crowd at the Saturn Awards, "I say, protect yourselves from AI interfering with your authentic and honest expressions."