Avatar director James Cameron has called AI actors “horrifying” and said what generative AI technology creates is “an average”.
Cameron was speaking to CBS on Sunday Morning in the run-up to the release of the third Avatar film, subtitled Fire and Ash, and was asked about the pioneering technology he used in his film-making. After praising motion-capture performance as “a celebration of the actor-director moment”, Cameron expressed his disdain for artificial intelligence. “Go to the other end of the spectrum [from motion capture] and you’ve got generative AI, where they can make up a character. They can make up an actor. They can make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. It’s like, no. That’s horrifying to me. That’s the opposite. That’s exactly what we’re not doing.”
He added: “I don’t want a computer doing what I pride myself on being able to do with actors. I don’t want to replace actors, I love working with actors.”
Cameron, who is a director of UK-based company Stability AI, said that artificial intelligence’s creative benefits are limited. “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. So what you can’t have is that individual screenwriter’s unique lived experience and their quirks. You won’t find the idiosyncrasies of a particular actor.”
He added: “It also causes us to have to set our bar to a very disciplined level, and to continue to be out-of-the-box imaginative. The act of performance, the act of actually seeing an artist creating in real time, will become sacred.”
