Ice-T Is OK With AI Replacing Him: I Could ‘Act Forever’

Artificial intelligence? No, AI stands for Artificial Ice-T.

While AI was one of the main issues at the heart of the 4-month-long SAG-AFTRA strike, the 65-year-old Ice-T doesn’t see a problem with NBC using his likeness and voice to portray his beloved Law & Order: SVU character, Detective Odafin Tutuola, long after he’s gone. “I think Ice-T could potentially act forever,” he recently told Page Six.

“I wouldn’t care,” he added. “I think to say ‘no’ would be selfish. A future AI version of me would be better than me.” The rapper-turned-actor believes that a future with artificial entertainers is inevitable. “I believe it’s coming, and we need to just address it as it comes. There is nothing you can do. One of my favorite quotes from [producer] Quincy Jones is, ‘If you want to lose a fight, fight the future.’ [So,] If you can’t beat them, join them. I am trying to read as much [as I can] to be involved as it grows.”

Ice-T also weighed in on how his fellow actors and other professionals in the entertainment industry have been “freaking [out] because they think they are going to lose their jobs — but people can lose their jobs at any time.”

He added that he doesn’t think technological advancement means everyone will lose their jobs — it just means that “they will have different jobs, we will become more computer-ish type people. When you imagine the future, you don’t imagine manual tasks, you imagine future s–t.”

The issue of AI was on the entertainment world’s mind throughout the SAG-AFTRA strike. When the studios and the guild reached an agreement in November, SAG-AFTRA got most of the AI restrictions it wanted, including the demand that a studio must get permission from actors before using elements of their likeness. If a studio wanted to create an actor using “Brad Pitt’s smile and Jennifer Aniston’s eyes” (the example given by SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, Duncan-Crabtree-Ireland), then it would have to get both actors’ consent.

After reaching the agreement in November, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher celebrated by saying she felt “great relief and happiness that we stood firm, we held our ground and we got a historic and seminal contract at a point in history where it was necessary.”

“There is so much language in this contract that covers so much new ground that has never been in any other contract before, and that was the point of this negotiation,” she added.

SAG-AFTRA ratified the contract on December 5. Variety reported that some actors thought the new deal didn’t go far enough, as the contract doesn’t prohibit studios from training AI on actors’ likenesses to create “synthetic” performers who don’t resemble any living performer.