Key Takeaways James Cameron, 71, is the director of movies like “Avatar” and “Titanic.”
Generative AI can automatically generate scenes, characters and objects based on text prompts, a prospect Cameron called “horrifying.”
Cameron uses performance capture to create lifelike characters for “Avatar,” a technique he called “the opposite” of AI.
James Cameron, the 71-year-old director behind movies like Avatar and Titanic, is not a fan of generative AI, calling the technology “horrifying.”
In a CBS Sunday Morning interview tied to the December 19 release of Avatar: Fire and Ash, Cameron weighed in on generative AI, which makes up characters, actors and performances from scratch with just a text prompt. The AI figures out by itself how to carry out what the prompt asks for.
“No, that’s horrifying to me,” Cameron said in the interview. “That’s exactly what we’re not doing.”
Cameron said that performance capture, a technique he uses in the movie, can appear similar to generative AI — but it is actually “the opposite.”
Related: Universal Pictures Just Added an Anti-AI Legal Warning to the End of Its Movies, Including ‘How to Train Your Dragon’
Performance capture is a technique used to record an actor’s full performance, including body language and facial expressions. That data is then mapped onto computer-generated characters.
“For years, there was this sense that, ‘Oh, they’re doing something strange with computers, and they’re replacing actors,'” Cameron said in the interview. “When in fact, once you really drill down and you see what we’re doing, it’s a celebration of the actor-director moment.”
... continue reading