James Cameron wonders if AI could be used to cut the budget of blockbusters in half

Blockbusters have become hugely expensive, and Avatar director James Cameron wonders if AI could be the answer.

AI isn’t going away anytime soon, but it still remains to be seen how it will be used as a tool in filmmaking. While speaking on the Boz to the Future podcast, Avatar director James Cameron pondered the future of AI and whether it could be used to cut the budgets of blockbusters in half.

Cameron, who joined the board of Stability AI last year, said, “In the old days, I would have founded a company to figure it out. I’ve learned maybe that’s not the best way to do it. So I thought, all right, I’ll join the board of a good, competitive company that’s got a good track record. My goal was not necessarily make a shit pile of money. The goal was to understand the space, to understand what’s on the minds of the developers. What are they targeting? What’s their development cycle? How much resources 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 continued, “And it’s not just hypothetical, 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 — Call it Dune, Dune Two something like that, 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. Now that’s not about laying off half the staff and at the effects 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.“

Regarding the ethics and copyright aspects of AI, Cameron thinks studios, tech companies, and legislators should focus on the output, not the input. “A lot of the a lot of the hesitation in Hollywood and entertainment in general, are issues of the source material for the training data, and who deserves what, and copyright protection and all that sort of thing. I think people are looking at it all wrong,” Cameron explained. “I’m an artist. Anybody that’s an artist, anybody that’s a human being, is a model. You’re a model already, you’ve got a three and a half pound meat computer.“

“We’re models moving through space and time and reacting based on on the our training data,” Cameron continued. “So my point is, as a screenwriter, as a filmmaker, if I exactly copy Star Wars, I’ll get sued. Actually, I won’t even get that far. Everybody’ll say, ‘hey, it’s too much like Star Wars, we’re going to get sued now.’ I won’t even get the money. And as a screenwriter, you have a kind of built in ethical filter that says, ‘I know my sources, I know what I liked, I know what I’m emulating.’ I also know that I have to move it far enough away that it’s my own independent creation. So I think the whole thing needs to be managed from a legal perspective, as to what’s the output, not what’s the input. You can’t control my input, you can’t tell me what to view and what to see and where to go. My input is whatever I choose it to be, and whatever has accumulated throughout my life. My output, every script I write, should be judged on whether it’s too close, too plagiaristic, whatever.“

James Cameron’s next film, Avatar: Fire and Ash, will hit theaters on December 19th. It will reportedly include a title card saying that no generative AI was used in the making of the film.