Director James Cameron: AI could replace Schwarzenegger

“Artificial intelligence (AI) may become a movie director, but it cannot replace Arnold Schwarzenegger (star of The Terminator),” said James Cameron, a world-renowned film director known for films including The Terminator and Avatar. He commented that advanced AI systems may replace movie directors but cannot replace actors with original performances based on experience.

“If you have an artificial general intelligence [system] that has an ego, that has consciousness, who’s to say it is not an artist?” said Director Cameron in an interview with the Financial Times on Saturday (local time). We’ve been doing art since we had consciousness, so why can’t an AGI do it at that point—write a script, direct a movie, do whatever?”

OpenAI, the generative AI ChatGPT developer, introduced Sora earlier this year. Sora can create videos with text (sentences), and its content seems undistinguishable from real videos.

“Everybody’s freaking out over the ability to snap their fingers and get a cool image. But you can’t make a movie out of it. It has potential, but it hasn’t achieved that level yet,” he said. However, the director said the AI technology could eliminate some of the mundane tasks involved in filmmaking, freeing directors to do more shots in less time. Cameron spent 13 years working on Avatar: The Way of Water, which was released in 2022.

Still, Cameron predicted that AI would not be able to replace actors. The machine could give you a plausible performance, but it won’t give you the quirky moment of creation that an actor gives that is particular to them and their life experience,” he said. “Generative AI can give you a bitmap and an image but can’t give you an emotion.” The Financial Times pointed out that though Cameron was open about the role of AI in film production, he did not believe AI can act like a human.”

This interview was published amid ongoing conflict over the use of AI in Hollywood. Last year, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Actors and Broadcasters Union (SAG-AFTRA) went on a co-strike for the first time in 63 years, claiming that AI was taking away jobs from writers and actors.


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