James Cameron may be exploring how artificial intelligence can help assist directing blockbuster movies, but he’s still aware that his “Terminator” franchise could very much become a reality if AI gets into the wrong hands. In an interview with Rolling Stone to promote the book release of “Ghosts of Hiroshima,” which he plans on adapting into a movie, the Oscar-winning “Titantic” and “Avatar” director said an arms race relying on AI is a dangerous thing.
“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 said. “Because the theater of operations is so rapid, the decision windows are so fast, it would take a super-intelligence to be able to process it, and maybe we’ll be smart and keep a human in the loop. But humans are fallible, and there have been a lot of mistakes made that have put us right on the brink of international incidents that could have led to nuclear war. So I don’t know.”
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“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 super-intelligence,” he added. “They’re all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time. Maybe the super-intelligence is the answer. I don’t know. I’m not predicting that, but it might be.”
Cameron’s “The Terminator” franchise kicked off in 1984 with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role. The film is set in a world where an artificially-intelligent defense network known as Skynet has become self-aware and has conquered humanity.
As far as Hollywood and AI is concerned, Cameron said in a viral interview with CTV News in 2023 that he doubted AI could ever come up with a “good story” that could replace screenwriters.
According to Cameron: “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it…I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”
But Cameron is thinking about how AI can help facilitate blockbuster filmmaking amid skyrocketing production costs. The director announced in September 2024 that he was joining the board of directors for Stability AI, the company behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion. He said on the “Boz to the Future” podcast earlier this year that the future of blockbuster filmmaking hinges on being able to “cut the cost of [VFX] in half.”
“If we want to continue to see the kinds of movies that I’ve always loved and that I like to make and that I will go to see — ‘Dune,’ ‘Dune: Part Two,’ or one of my films or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films — we’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost in half,” Cameron said about how AI might be helpful. “Now that’s not about laying off half the staff and at the effects company. That’s about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? That’s my sort of vision for that.”
Head over to Rolling Stone’s website to read Cameron’s latest interview in its entirety.
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