World famous director James Cameron is known to admire the capabilities of artificial intelligence for certain applications, but feels its use is extremely distasteful for others.
In a CBS Sunday Morning Interview on Nov 30, Cameron stated that using generative AI to create actors in a production instead of having a flesh and blood performer was horrific.
“I don’t want a computer doing what I pride myself on being able to do with actors,” he explained on the program. “I don’t want to replace actors; I love working with actors.”
Generative artificial intelligence essentially pumps all human art and human experience into a blender to come up with its characters, according to the film mogul’s description.
“They can make up a character. They can make up an actor,” he said. “They can make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. That’s horrifying to me.”
Cameron’s statements were made during a segment of the show linked to the upcoming release of Avatar: Fire and Ash – the third installment in the film series. In the episode, performers can be observed acting in a 250,000-gallon water tank for the movie’s underwater scenes while wearing specialized motion capture suits with cameras rigged up in front of their faces.
In another interview with IGN at the end of September, the Titanic director highlighted that despite his distaste for generative AI characters, he feels the tech could be highly beneficial for reducing VFX costs in the industry.
“We’ve managed to make these gorgeous Avatar movies with zero Gen AI,” Cameron told the entertainment-focused media outlet.
“But Avatar films are quite expensive,” he continued. “If we could use Generative AI to bring costs down in VFX, then more films like Avatar could be made.”
These could include “fantastic” motion pictures in the sci-fi genre or historical dramas that require VFX tech to be adequately realistic, Cameron elaborated.
The Avatar visionary currently sits on the Board of Directors at Stability AI: a generative AI company renowned for its stylistically rich and diverse content generation capabilities. Stability AI, however, has weathered intense financial turbulence since its near-collapse last year, surviving on emergency funding and drastic leadership changes throughout 2025.
Read more: Wonder Studios raises US$12M in seed for AI film production
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