Emerging technology, when first being presented to the public-at-large, is bound to get people fearful and protective of the status quo. Such is the current case with AI and its practical application in multiple industries, particularly in the space of visual media arts, but rather than turn away, renowned filmmaker and technological innovator James Cameron is choosing to lean in. Last year, he joined the board of the generative AI company Stability AI and during a recent interview on the “Boz to the Future” podcast, he explained how the tech’s ability to shorten VFX workflow could truly be a game-changer without creating a massive disruption to the jobs market.
“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 of that in half,” Cameron said. “Now that’s not about laying off half the staff at a VFX 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.”
In Cameron joining Stability AI’s Board of Directors, the company’s CEO Prem Akkaraju said in September 2024 that the “Avatar” creator would help the company “transform visual media for the next century by giving creators a full stack AI pipeline to bring their ideas to life.” To hear Cameron himself explain it, his real purpose in stepping behind the curtain was to get a sense for how these businesses operated and how the tech was being shaped.
“The goal was to understand the space, to understand what’s on the minds of the developers,” he said during the “Boz to the Future” podcast. “What are they targeting? What’s their development cycle? How much resources do 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.”
Cameron believes that AI’s true benefit to the world of film and television won’t be in creating full content, but in being applied to specific aspects of visual effects output and post-production. Even though most of the attention AI has gotten relates to how it might steal copyrighted material and even Google and OpenAI themselves have admitted to wishing that material were considered fair-use when applied to the tech, Cameron doesn’t see taking over entertainment as a real purpose for these companies.
“You look at Open AI, their goal is not to make Gen-AI movies. We’re a little wart on their butt in terms of the scale. They want to make consumer-fun products for 8 billion people, and I’m sure Meta is very much the same,” Cameron said on the Meta-produced show. “Anybody that’s striving to get market share in that space, movies are just a little tiny application, tiny use case, and it’s too tiny right, that’s the problem, so it’s going to be smaller, sort of boutique type Gen-AI developer groups that I can get the attention of and say, ‘Hey I got a problem here, it’s called rotoscope or it’s called this or it’s called that, how do I outpaint, upscale, whatever needs to be done in a workflow that already exists that’s CG based.’”
This is certainly a different tune than what Cameron was singing back in 2023. During an interview with CTV News, he pushed that “the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger” to our society. At the same time, even then, he was saying AI would never be able to whole-cloth create a film of actual substance.
“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,” Cameron said, “I don’t believe that that’s going to move an audience.”
Watch Cameron’s full interview on “Boz to the Future” below.
