“I just wanted to point out we don’t use it on the Avatar films,” Cameron says. “We honor and celebrate actors. We don’t replace actors. That’s going to find its level. I think Hollywood will be self-policing on that. We’ll find our way through that. But we can only find our way through it as artists if we exist. So it’s the existential threat from big AI that worries me more than all that stuff.”
Still, he’s “not negative about generative AI” probably because he sits on the board of Stability AI, the creators of Stable Diffusion, an open-source image generator. He’s more concerned about the existential threat of “big AI,” which has kept Cameron awake at night for decades. More than 40 years after The Terminator, “Skynet has become self-aware” remains the go-to for anyone looking to criticize the out-of-control SPAM-generating, plagiarism-machines currently propping up the U.S. economy. He continues:
“They call it the ‘Skynet Problem,’ and it’s being discussed. But obviously, what they’re talking about is alignment. If you’re hip to general intelligence issues and AI overall, alignment is a big issue. And they have to be trained, they have to be taught, they have to be constrained so that they work only toward human good. The problem is, who makes that decision? Who decides what’s good for us? We can’t agree amongst ourselves on a damn thing. All religions are at odds over ethics, morality, and so on. All the governments have different [ideas], so whose morality, whose sense of what’s best for us, is going to prevail?”
We’re going to assume that James Cameron thinks James Cameron is best equipped to make these decisions.