One of the major sticking points which caused the WGA strike and potential SAG strike is that writers and actors don’t want to be replaced by AI. Celebrities! They’re just like us! Unless you want to be replaced by a chat bot. Not gonna yuck your yum.
Now, thanks to his interview in Rolling Stone, we know where Samuel L. Jackson stands on the topic (and which phrases you should scratch out of any contract). Unsurprisingly, he’s been anti-image-exploitation since the jump.
“People just started worrying about that?” Jackson said. “I asked about that a long time ago. The first time I got scanned for George Lucas [for The Phantom Menace] I was like, ‘What’s this for?’ George and I are good friends so we kind of had a laugh about it because I thought he was doing it because he had all those old guys in Episode I, and if something happened to them, he still wanted to put ‘em in the movie. Ever since I’ve been in the Marvel Universe, every time you change costumes in a Marvel movie, they scan you. Ever since I did Captain Marvel, and they did the Lola project where they de-aged me and everything else, it’s like, ‘Well, I guess they can do this anytime they want to do it if they really want to!’ It could be something to worry about. Future actors should do what I always do when I get a contract and it has the words ‘in perpetuity’ and ‘known and unknown’ on it: I cross that shit out. It’s my way of saying, ‘No, I do not approve of this.’”
You heard the man. Cross that shit out.
(via Rolling Stone)