James Cameron believes that if artificial intelligence is misused, society might soon resemble the dystopian world of Terminator. The director expressed his concerns to Rolling Stone while speaking about Charles Pellegrino‘s novel Ghosts of Hiroshima, which Cameron will soon be adapting for the big screen.
“I do think there’s still a danger of a Terminator-style apocalypse where you put AI together with weapons systems, even up to the level of nuclear weapon systems, nuclear defense counterstrike, all that stuff,” he said. “Because the theater of operations is so rapid, the decision windows are so fast, it would take a superintelligence to be able to process it, and maybe we’ll be smart and keep a human in the loop. But humans are fallible, and there have been a lot of mistakes made that have put us right on the brink of international incidents that could have led to nuclear war.”
Cameron, of course, is no stranger to AI. Beyond the Terminator films, he’s used it on numerous occasions to bring his ideas to the screen—notably in his Alien and Avatar sagas. But in his view, one of the real dangers facing our society is artificial intelligence moving from the creative industries to political and military conquest, with power as the ultimate reward.
“I feel like we’re at this cusp in human development where you’ve got the three existential threats: climate and our overall degradation of the natural world, nuclear weapons, and superintelligence,” he continued. “They’re all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time. Maybe the superintelligence is the answer. I don’t know. I’m not predicting that, but it might be.”
Cameron is currently a board member of Stability AI, a company that creates artificial intelligence models for converting text data into digital images. By joining the company, the filmmaker hopes to understand the AI development system and integrate it into special effects. But he has also made clear that artificial intelligence will never replace employees in the film industry—a stance he already defended in 2023, when he spoke of the crucial role of screenwriters.
“I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it … I don’t believe that have something that’s going to move an audience,” he told CTV News. “Let’s wait 20 years, and if an AI wins an Oscar for Best Screenplay, I think we’ve got to take them seriously.”
Original story in VF France.
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