Nicolas Cage Refused Amazon's AI Waiver. The Man Already Can't Be Copied

On Saturday, at a panel at New York Comic Con, Nicolas Cage told the crowd he did not sign an AI waiver when he made Spider-Noir, the Prime Video series that ran a single season. He called himself not an AI-friendly actor, called Amazon a very AI-friendly company, pointed to its investment in OpenAI, and said he's probably not going to work with that studio again. He added that he's fine with that, and he did sound fine. He was there promoting a new film he's shooting, and he mentioned he'll likely do a season of True Detective.

Now, Amazon hasn't answered him in the reports I've seen, and I don't know what the waiver said, so I won't pretend to. But I'll tell you what struck me. Of all the actors in Hollywood to worry about being copied by a computer, Nicolas Cage is the one I'd worry about least.

Think about it. A computer learns by studying what a man has done before and guessing what he'll do next. Cage has made a career out of not doing what anyone guessed. He won an Oscar, then made action movies, then made movies nobody could explain, then played a version of himself, then a man who loses a pig, then a Spider-Man. You could feed every one of those into a machine and it would come back with a headache. It would guess he'd do a quiet drama. He'd show up as a vampire.

My father used to say you can't forge the signature of a man who signs his name differently every time. He was talking about checks. It applies to actors too.

Still, it's no small thing to tell one of the biggest companies on earth you won't play its game, and do it out loud at a fan convention. Most men who walk away from a studio do it quietly and blame scheduling. Cage did it with a microphone. Whatever the machines learn from him, I hope it's that.