Nicolas Cage Was Freaked Out By His Flash Cameo, And You Should Be Too
If Nicholas Cage's surprise cameo in "The Flash" felt strange to you, you're not alone: it also caught the actor himself off guard. In an interview with Yahoo, the "Dream Scenario" actor spoke about his time on set filming the poorly received DC movie, and revealed that what he filmed ended up having nothing to do with what he saw when he watched the final film.
Cage took time to praise director Andy Muschietti for his past work, and noted that he was glad to see the Kal-El suit that he was meant to don for Tim Burton's never-realized "Superman" film put to good use. "I do feel that the movie gave that beautiful suit that Colleen Atwood designed a chance to be seen, and I was happy about that because she put a heck of a lot of thought into that series," Cage told the outlet. Aside from the suit, though, Cage seems to have found the cameo pretty unrecognizable — given that the digital rendering of him shown in the film wasn't doing what he had done on set.
'That was not what I did'
The actor says he spent "maybe three hours" on the set of "The Flash," and was told his character, an alternate version of Kal-El, would be "standing in an alternate dimension, if you will, and witnessing the destruction of the universe." Cage says he had no lines and had to act only with his eyes, noting, "you can imagine with that short amount of time that I had, what that would mean in terms of what I can convey." Obviously, that work is not what ended up in "The Flash" at all. Instead, as Cage puts it, "When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider. I did not do that. That was not what I did."
While the actor says he thinks the sequence was probably achieved through a combination of digital de-aging and CGI, it clearly calls to mind conversations about the state of the industry in regards to artificial intelligence and performances being co-opted without actors' consent. "I don't think it [was] AI [in The Flash]. I just think that they did something with it, and again, it's out of my control," Cage explained, while noting that he agrees with director Tim Burton's anti-AI sentiments. Burton recently spoke to Variety about the way AI has been used to bastardize his own works, saying, "It takes something from your soul or psyche; that is very disturbing, especially if it has to do with you. It's like a robot taking your humanity, your soul."
The trouble with invisible AI
"I get where Tim's coming from. I know what he means," Cage says. "I would be very unhappy if people were taking my art ... and appropriating them." The actor called the use of AI in art "inhumane," stating plainly: "AI is a nightmare to me." Frankly, he's right. If the film industry has reached a point where actors can be used in properties without their knowledge, or have their specific performances spliced and remixed to make something that's almost always worse than the original, that's a travesty. When it comes to misinformation, copyright law, sex crimes (AI has already been used to generate fake pornography), and even national security matters, AI is worse than a travesty: it's perhaps the most dangerous, easily accessible tool of the modern era.
It's also troubling that as an actor, Cage can only tell us that he doesn't think his "The Flash" cameo utilized AI. The fact is, artificial intelligence tools are being used regularly in Hollywood, even when they aren't immediately visible. It's easy to get up in arms about something overt like Tom Hanks' stolen voice or the extremely janky-looking "Prom Pact" audience members, but what about the machine learning tools Netflix is apparently building to automate match cuts for filmmakers? Or the AI used to help build "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"? AI tools were proliferating in the filmmaking industry even before the term became a headline buzzword and a bottom line for striking actors and writers.
A nightmare we need to wake up from
Cage's weirdly retooled "The Flash" performance is pretty upsetting, even if it featured no AI, but it's also upsetting that we can't know for sure whether or not it did. The term "AI" encompasses a whole host of machine learning tools, some of which already seem to be deeply embedded in the Hollywood production process. If we already can't even tell what's AI and what isn't, how can we fight to protect artists' work from the harmful encroachment of digital imitation? More importantly, how can we protect each other and our world from serious misinformation about global issues that has been and will be perpetuated with AI?
Cage is right: AI is a nightmare, but it's one the world needs to wake up to before it's altogether too late to untangle it from our everyday lives. As with any tool, it can certainly be used for good, but without proper regulations, new media literacy strategies, and protections for artists, actors, and public officials most threatened by unauthorized replication, it's basically just a giant evil spider unleashed on the world — with no inexplicably sad-eyed CGI superhero to stop it.