James Cameron has no intention of using artificial intelligence to write a film script. In a new interview with CTV News, the Oscar winner expressed doubt over AI bots being able to write “a good story.”
According to Cameron: “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’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”
“Let’s wait 20 years, and if an AI wins an Oscar for best screenplay, I think we’ve got to take them seriously,” Cameron added.
While Cameron is bullish on AI bots becoming screenwriters, he’s far more concerned with AI leading to an actual nuclear holocaust.
“You got to follow the money,” he said. “Who’s building these things? They’re either building it to dominate marketing shares, so you’re teaching it greed, or you’re building it for defensive purposes, so you’re teaching it paranoia. I think the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger.”
Cameron continued, “I think that we will get into the equivalent of a nuclear arms race with AI, and if we don’t build it, the other guys are for sure going to build it, and so then it’ll escalate…You could imagine an AI in a combat theatre, the whole thing just being fought by the computers at a speed humans can no longer intercede, and you have no ability to deescalate.”
“I warned you guys in 1984!” he added. “And you didn’t listen.”
Cameron is, of course, referring to “The Terminator,” his 1984 action classic starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film is set in a world where an artificially-intelligent defense network known as Skynet has become self-aware and has conquered humanity.
“Today, everyone is frightened of it, of where this is gonna go,” Schwarzenegger recently said about AI. “And in this movie, in ‘Terminator,’ we talk about the machines becoming self-aware and they take over… Now over the course of decades, it has become a reality. So it’s not any more fantasy or kind of futuristic. It is here today. And so this is the extraordinary writing of Jim Cameron.”
Head over to CTV News’ website to watch Cameron’s latest interview in its entirety.
