The rise of generative AI has undoubtedly lowered the barrier to entry for creating film, with individuals as well as massive production companies leveraging the technology in different ways. But many, including Academy Award-winning filmmaker James Cameron, have insisted that generative AI is no substitute for human actors.
“What generative AI can’t do is create something new that’s never been seen. The models … are trained on everything that’s ever been done before; it can’t be trained on that which has never been done. So you will innately see, essentially, all of human art and human experience put into a blender, and you’ll get something that is kind of an average of that.”
Lights, camera, action
Speaking to CBS ahead of the official release of ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’, Cameron described his horror at encountering AI acting.
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Having enjoyed a long and successful career in Hollywood, the filmmaker has dedicated the latter period of his career to the Avatar franchise.
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This is primarily a means to explore innovation and the introduction of technology in cinema, with Avatar a torchbearer for 3D and its sequel extending it with new camera and performance-capture innovations.
One area that he’s categorically unenthused about, however, is AI — and the use of generative AI as a substitute for human creative input, in particular.
Bad robot
After praising the motion-capture innovations in his film during the interview, he then opined on the “other end of the spectrum”, expressing his disdain for the way that generative AI threatens to supplant creative input.
He described the notion of generating actors and performances simply using a text prompt as “horrifying” and said it’s the opposite of what he was hoping to achieve with the technology being developed for the ‘Avatar’ film series.
Cameron is also the director of Stability AI, a company that delivers professional-grade generative AI tools for content creators. However, Cameron has insisted that generative AI can never create something completely original, based on the underlying transformer-based architecture that powers these systems.
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