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Avatar creator James Cameron is cautiously pro-generative AI, except on his own movies
The man who came up with Skynet thinks generative AI could help visual effects artists work twice as quickly
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Unlike other big name filmmakers, James Cameron isn’t necessarily unconvinced by generative AI — but he sees it as a tool that assists artists, rather than replace them, as he explained during a recent interview.
Nobody should be surprised that Cameron is remaining open to the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence; he is, after all,https://stability.ai/news/james-cameron-joins-stability-ai-board-of-directors on the board of Stability AI, a company that claims that its mission “is to transform visual media for the next century by giving creators a full stack AI pipeline to bring their ideas to life.” In an appearance on Meta’s Box to the Future podcast, Cameron explained why he joined the company — and what he sees as the potential of using generative AI in movies.
“In the old days, I would have founded a company to figure it out,” Cameron admitted. (He has a track record of this kind of thing, having founded production companies Lightstorm Entertainment, Digital Domain, and Earthship Productions.) “My goal was not necessarily make a shit pile of money,” he said of the decision to join Stability AI’s board. “The goal was to understand the space, to understand what’s on the minds of the developers. What are they targeting? What’s their development cycle? How much resources you have to throw at it to create a new model that does a purpose built thing? And my goal was to try to integrate it into a VFX workflow.”
That last part seems to be Cameron’s particular focus.
“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 — call it Dune [or] Dune Two something like that, or one of my films, or big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films — we’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half,” he argued. “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 [generative AI].”
Cameron is currently at work on the third Avatar movie, Avatar: Fire and Ash — a movie that, curiously enough given Cameron’s stance above, will open with a title card reporting that no generative AI was used on the movie... something that Cameron himself revealed in a public appearance earlier this year.
Avatar: Fire and Ash will open December 19.
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