As the industry behind generative AI keeps touting its evolution, Hollywood stands on a precipice to see just who’s going to be first to break ground leveraging the controversial technology in film production (although, reportedly, not for a lack of trying and failing behind the scenes). But for James Cameron, at least, the current will-they-won’t-they approach is untenable—and the filmmaker believes that studios have to start getting a grip with the technology now, before it irrevocably damages the livelihoods of moviemaking creatives for good.
“I can’t think of anything coming up that is bigger and more important to us right now than confronting this generative AI issue,” Cameron recently told Screendaily, as he continues work on the future of the Avatar franchise in New Zealand. “It is critical that we master it and control it so that it remains an artistic tool and it doesn’t replace artists. The idea that this technology could potentially replace actors and the unique lens that every artist brings is horrifying… The new tools have the possibility of doing great harm because they can replace an actor, or they can synthesize an actor who is dead.”
Cameron has already been vocal over his concern with generative AI, leveraging his cultural history with the robo-apocalypse seen in the Terminator movies to jokingly, but not really jokingly, warn people that unchecked embrace of AI is a dangerous moment we find ourselves in—whether it’s for creative or other technological purposes.
“I do think there’s still a danger of a Terminator-style apocalypse where you put AI together with weapons systems, even up to the level of nuclear weapon systems, nuclear defense counterstrike, all that stuff,” Cameron recently told Rolling Stone. “I feel like we’re at this cusp in human development where you’ve got the three existential threats: climate and our overall degradation of the natural world, nuclear weapons, and superintelligence. They’re all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time. Maybe the superintelligence is the answer. I don’t know. I’m not predicting that, but it might be.”
Cameron hopes that one of those threats, climate change, might be combatted in part by the legacy of the sci-fi worlds he explores in Avatar. But as for generative AI, the filmmaker does not necessarily see the technology as a threat to be destroyed—instead, to be mastered and contained before it replaces human creativity. Last year, it was announced that Cameron had joined the executive board of StabilityAI, in part to see how the intersection of AI-generated images and visual FX work could be used in filmmaking.
“I want to learn it, I want to master it for myself, then use my own best judgment about how I apply it to my personal art,” Cameron continued to Screen Daily. “It takes me four years to make an Avatar movie, so I think about how great it would be if I could do it in three years or two years.”
“Movies are very, very expensive now, and it seems to me that the cinema is becoming less important to the world at large, which is horrifying as well after spending 42 years making movies to be seen in movie theaters,” he concluded. “We’re not seeing as many movies getting greenlit and getting made of the type that I love—the fantasy, the phantasmagorical, science fiction, big, visually opulent films.”
But while Cameron is open to seeing how the technology could aid filmmakers at some point, right now, it’s seemingly clear to him the current state of generative AI has no place in his creative process—it was reported earlier this year that Cameron claimed Avatar: Fire and Ash, due out later this year, will open with a title card informing the audience that no generative AI was used in the process of its creation.