Key Takeaways
- James Cameron, 71, is the director of movies like “Avatar” and “Titanic.”
- Generative AI can automatically generate scenes, characters and objects based on text prompts, a prospect Cameron called “horrifying.”
- Cameron uses performance capture to create lifelike characters for “Avatar,” a technique he called “the opposite” of AI.
James Cameron, the 71-year-old director behind movies like Avatar and Titanic, is not a fan of generative AI, calling the technology “horrifying.”
In a CBS Sunday Morning interview tied to the December 19 release of Avatar: Fire and Ash, Cameron weighed in on generative AI, which makes up characters, actors and performances from scratch with just a text prompt. The AI figures out by itself how to carry out what the prompt asks for.
“No, that’s horrifying to me,” Cameron said in the interview. “That’s exactly what we’re not doing.”
Cameron said that performance capture, a technique he uses in the movie, can appear similar to generative AI — but it is actually “the opposite.”
Performance capture is a technique used to record an actor’s full performance, including body language and facial expressions. That data is then mapped onto computer-generated characters.
“For years, there was this sense that, ‘Oh, they’re doing something strange with computers, and they’re replacing actors,’” Cameron said in the interview. “When in fact, once you really drill down and you see what we’re doing, it’s a celebration of the actor-director moment.”
Performance capture requires acting from the cast to create realistic computer-generated characters. For example, the CBS interview shows the cast of Avatar performing their underwater scenes in a 250,000-gallon water tank.
Cameron isn’t fully anti-AI. The acclaimed filmmaker is a director of Stability AI, an AI company known for its text-to-image model Stable Diffusion. He joined the startup’s board of directors last year, citing the promise of AI tools that can be used in visual effects to speed up the process of making movies at a lower cost.
However, in the CBS interview, Cameron said that AI’s creative potential is limited. The technology can’t create something new that has never been seen before; it instead essentially puts all of the human experience “into a blender” and creates something “that is kind of an average of that,” he said.
Related: An AI-Made Animated Feature Film Backed By OpenAI Is Premiering Next Year
A major film studio has begun to use AI technology in its work. Netflix first used generative AI in a TV show in July to create a scene of a building falling in Buenos Aires. Netflix created the scene for the Argentine science fiction show El Eternauta and completed it “10 times faster” than it would have with standard tools and workflows, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on an earnings call in July.
Sarandos said the AI-generated scene resonated with the show’s audience.
“This is real people doing real work with better tools,” Sarandos said on the call. “The creators were thrilled with the result. We were thrilled with the result, and more importantly, the audience was thrilled with the result.”
Key Takeaways
- James Cameron, 71, is the director of movies like “Avatar” and “Titanic.”
- Generative AI can automatically generate scenes, characters and objects based on text prompts, a prospect Cameron called “horrifying.”
- Cameron uses performance capture to create lifelike characters for “Avatar,” a technique he called “the opposite” of AI.
James Cameron, the 71-year-old director behind movies like Avatar and Titanic, is not a fan of generative AI, calling the technology “horrifying.”
In a CBS Sunday Morning interview tied to the December 19 release of Avatar: Fire and Ash, Cameron weighed in on generative AI, which makes up characters, actors and performances from scratch with just a text prompt. The AI figures out by itself how to carry out what the prompt asks for.
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