James Cameron hopes generative artificial intelligence can relieve the pressure on Hollywood's bottom line.
The Academy Award winner discussed AI and filmmaking with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth on the latest episode of the "Boz to the Future" podcast.
Cameron has been outspoken about the technology, which has been a source of controversy in the entertainment industry. The growing prevalence of AI in the film-making process helped spark the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strike and, more recently, prompted debate ahead of the 2025 Academy Awards.
Although Cameron was previously critical of AI, he joined the board of directors for Stability AI, the company behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, in 2024.
During the interview, Cameron said the decision stemmed from his desire to understand the technology.
"My goal was not necessarily to make a shit pile of money. The goal was to understand the space. To understand what's on the minds of the developers," Cameron said. "What are they targeting? What's their development cycle? How many resources do you have to throw at it to create a new model that does a purpose-built thing and my goal was to try to integrate it into a VFX workflow."
Cameron believes filmmakers must embrace AI to cut the cost of "big effects-heavy, CG-heavy" blockbuster films. "We've got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half," he said.
Hollywood budgets have shrunk due to several factors, including studios ordering less content and a slow box office.
"That's not about laying off half the staff and the effects company," Cameron said. "That's about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? That's my sort of vision for that."
Cameron also talked about the opposition to using other people's work to train AI models — a major point of contention not just among those working in movies but among all artists.
Companies like OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, have been criticized for gobbling up intellectual property to train their AI models. A group of authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, sued the company for copyright infringement.
"A lot of the hesitation in Hollywood and entertainment in general, are issues of the source material for the training data, and who deserves what, and copyright protection and all that sort of thing. I think people are looking at it all wrong," Cameron said. "I'm an artist. Anybody that's an artist, anybody that's a human being, is a model."
"You can't control my input. You can't tell me what to view and what to see and where to go," Cameron said. "My input is whatever I choose it to be and whatever has accumulated throughout my life. My output, every script I write, should be judged on whether it's too close, too plagiaristic, whatever."
Representatives for Cameron did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
