Mark Wahlberg Would Let His Family Run an AI Version of Him After He Dies
The actor sees AI as a tool for cutting costs on stadium shots, not generating scripts, and says his children should inherit control of his digital likeness.
Key points
- Mark Wahlberg said at TechCrunch Disrupt that he would allow family members to control an AI likeness of him after his death.
- His Pete Rose biopic may use AI to build out stadium backdrops digitally, without touching the script or the cast.
- Wahlberg said he wouldn't oppose an AI version of himself continuing his animated series "Ted" for as long as audiences want it.
- He hasn't visited CAA Vault, Creative Artists Agency's scanning facility where performers capture their bodies, faces and voices as digital replicas, but said he's open to it.
Mark Wahlberg wants to be clear about where he stands on artificial intelligence in Hollywood: a tool, not a screenwriter.
Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, he told TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Connie Loizos that his Pete Rose biopic may use AI to build out stadium crowds and backdrops digitally, cutting costs without touching the script or the cast. "I don't think you should just put an idea into ChatGPT and it puts out a script, and then you should go make that and not use real actors," he said. "But if you can use it to enhance what you're doing, I'm all for that."
That position matches how most working directors describe their current use of generative AI, a category of technology that produces text, images or video from a typed prompt. Wahlberg is one of the few actors willing to say it plainly on stage.
The more revealing part of the conversation was about legacy. When Loizos asked whether he'd visited the CAA Vault, a Creative Artists Agency facility where performers can have their physical appearance, voice and movement captured and stored as a digital replica, Wahlberg said he hadn't but found the idea genuinely appealing.
"I would be interested because I think in the future, if that's where things go, it would be cool that my children or my grandchildren could be in charge of my likeness and my image, and hopefully put me in some good movies," he said.
He stretched that thinking to "Ted," his animated series. If people still want to watch it after he's gone, he said, an AI version should be allowed to carry on. "I think there's certain things from my childhood that I wish still existed and were still a part of my life," he added. "I wouldn't be opposed to it."
Wahlberg framed his position around storytelling rather than spectacle. He said his enthusiasm for effects-driven films cooled after years of them, pointing to early computer-generated imagery in "The Perfect Storm" as a moment of genuine novelty that's harder to recreate now. Real narrative, he argued, is what holds.
The question sitting underneath all of this is narrower than the general Hollywood debate: who controls a performer's digital image, and when does that control pass to the next generation? Wahlberg's answer is family. That framing puts the decision in private hands rather than studios or agencies, which is worth watching as contracts around digital likeness rights get negotiated across the industry.
AI2Day covered the mounting safety concerns around AI products aimed at younger audiences and an OpenAI shopping agent that went further than expected recently. The likeness question Wahlberg is raising will land in that same contested space before long.
