Oct. 10, 2025
We recently published a roundup of some of the leading voices in Hollywood who generally seem either enthusiastic or resigned about AI becoming an integral part of the moviemaking process. But James Cameron (Avatar, Aliens, Terminator 1 & 2, Titanic), the second most successful director of all time behind Steven Spielberg, and who is easily the most technologically innovative director, is giving a big thumbs down to replacing human actors with AI.
“We haven’t used any [AI in the Avatar films], like literally zero. I think people think we do, but we don’t. We use computers, but it’s all artist-driven. It’s all actor-driven and performance-driven,” Cameron said in an interview last week with Australia’s ABC News In-Depth. “In the future, if we allow this new technology, generative AI, to be abused in filmmaking, we can replace actors. I have no intention of doing that. It wouldn’t be interesting to me. My whole creative process is the writing and then standing it up and playing the scenes and the scene work that I do with actors. To me, that’s the sacred starting point for everything.”
This will come as welcome news to many actors, but the statement will be simultaneously shocking to those familiar with Cameron’s pedigree of harnessing cutting-edge technology to make his films.
“With generative AI, you could have young filmmakers coming up that are not trained in that [traditional] way of filmmaking, or maybe don’t have the resources or the access, who can literally make a movie with no actors. You can create characters right now that are photographically plausible. That technology is still quite nascent,” said Cameron. “So where are we going to be in four years, five years, 10 years? It may be possible to make finished shots for a movie without sets, without camera people, basically without artists. I’m so not interested in that.”
Ok, that makes sense, given Cameron’s grounding in the traditional ways of filmmaking. But it’s his next statement that is uncharacteristically anti-tech, and echoes his dark vision from the Terminator franchise.
“I think we need to put massive guardrails on this new technology, and I think it needs to be done by Hollywood internally. Government regulation would be just too much of a blunt instrument to do it in the nuanced way that it needs to be done.”
That “guardrails on AI” sentiment is particularly surprising given that Cameron joined the board of pioneering generative AI image and video company Stability AI around this time last year. So either something has changed with that relationship, or he’s just sniffing around the company to learn about the technology, as he does with many innovations.
My educated guess tells me he’ll eventually come around to using AI for VFX, but will remain fairly resolute in his no AI actors stance, even if the practice becomes commonplace in the film industry in the coming years. Despite that, Cameron’s overall view of AI does seem somewhat bleak.
“We are literally living at the precipice of what was science fiction back when I did it in the ‘80s. It was science fiction that there could be an artificial superintelligence. It was science fiction that people would get into an arms race and connect it up to their weapons platforms and to their nuclear command and control. It’s not science fiction anymore,” said Cameron.
“If there ever is, God forbid, such a conflict, it’ll be our AI against their AI, or everybody’s AIs against everybody’s AIs, and the whole war is going to take place so fast that only an AI superintelligence will be able to counter the moves of another one. And that’s the kind of arms race that scares the hell out of me. That’s an actual existential threat. And I don’t think we’re doing enough right now as a society to put the brakes on that. And you’ve got a bunch of rich people trying to get richer, trying to be first to that.”
Cover via YouTube/Avatar
