“I warned you guys,” says Hollywood director James Cameron.<\/p>\n
More than 40 years since the first Terminator film was released, Cameron says the future it depicted is here.<\/p>\n
“We are literally living out the precipice of what was science fiction back when I did it in the eighties,” he told 7.30.<\/p>\n
“It was science fiction [that] there could be an artificial super intelligence.”<\/p>\n
The multi Academy Award-winning director has talked about creating a new Terminator story but admits that AI is moving so fast it makes it hard to get ahead of the tech.<\/p>\n
“I’m struggling with exactly how to tell a new Terminator story that won’t be obsolete in a year,” Cameron said.<\/p>\n
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Forty years ago Terminator brought ideas around AI to life. (SOPA Images)<\/p>\n
But what really concerns him is the potential for AI to be weaponised.<\/p>\n
“It was science fiction that people would get into an arms race and connect it up to their weapons platforms and to their nuclear command and control,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It’s not science fiction anymore.”<\/p>\n
For the director whose career has been built on technological advances in filmmaking, the prospect of “machine super intelligence” that far surpasses human intelligence is frightening.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think we’re doing enough right now societally to put the brakes on that. And you’ve got a bunch of rich people trying to get richer trying to be first to that,” he said.<\/p>\n
No to AI actors and filmmakers<\/p>\n
Cameron spoke to 7.30 from Los Angeles to promote the one-week cinema re-release of ‘Avatar, The Way of Water’, ahead of the anticipated December premier of the next instalment in the series called ‘Fire and Ash’.<\/p>\n
“It’s a shameless ploy to get more money,” Cameron joked before explaining he wants people who have only seen ‘Avatar’ on their televisions to get the full cinema experience.<\/p>\n
“I make movies for the cinema. I believe in the cinema,” he added.<\/p>\n
Avatar 3 will open with a title card saying that no generative AI was used in the making of the film.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cameron says he made a conscious choice early on not to rely on the nascent technology.<\/p>\n
“Historically and inclusive of the new film that’s coming out, not just the re-release of The Way of Water … we haven’t used any. I think people think we do, but we don’t,” he said.<\/p>\n
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The Avatar franchise has been a massive success for James Cameron. (Gabe Ginsberg\/WireImage)<\/p>\n
“We use computers, but it’s all artist driven. It’s all actor driven and performance driven.”<\/p>\n
Cameron says generative AI has the power to redefine filmmaking and not necessarily for the better.<\/p>\n
“You can create characters right now that are photographically plausible,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“So where are we going to be in four years, five years, 10 years? It may be possible to make finished shots for a movie without sets, without camera people, without basically without artists.<\/p>\n
“I am so not interested in that.”<\/p>\n
However he wants the film industry to step in and protect the craft.<\/p>\n
“I think we need to put massive guardrails on this new technology,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I think it needs to be done by Hollywood internally. I think government regulation would be just too much of a blunt instrument.”<\/p>\n
A VR future for Avatar<\/p>\n
The idea for Avatar came to Cameron in a dream when he was just 19 years old.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Australia’s Sam Worthington had a breakout role in the original Avatar movie. (Bertrand Rindoff Petroff\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
“I had a dream of a bioluminescent forest,” he told 7.30.<\/p>\n
“I was so galvanised by the dream, I jumped up and I drew it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I drew what I had seen and it had moss that was glowing on the ground. When you stepped on it, ripples of light moved out.<\/p>\n
“All the things that are actually in the first movie. Well, I didn’t do anything with that, I just stuck the drawings in a file folder.”<\/p>\n
With Fire and Ash weeks away from a December release Cameron is already working on fourth and \u00a0fifth instalments in the franchise.<\/p>\n
Asked about how he thinks we’ll be engaging with those future Avatar films, Cameron says virtual reality will transform the way we watch and make movies and television,<\/p>\n
“I think you’re gonna have an emerging new platform, which is gonna be VR and it’s gonna be based on very small form factor, almost glasses,” he said.<\/p>\n
“And they have the brightness and the resolution to be competitive with the theatre experience and they’re in 3D … this will become a new player in the landscape, a new way to consume.”<\/p>\n
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