James Cameron, the director behind the popular "Avatar" franchise, has described generative artificial intelligence (AI) as "horrifying".

Speaking to a recent interview with CBS Sunday Morning ahead of the release of "Avatar: Fire and Ash", Cameron said that although motion capture – the recording of movements in front of green screen in filmmaking – might appear similar to generative AI from the outside, the two could not be more different. Motion capture, he argued, relies entirely on the labour, presence and emotional nuance of real actors, whose movements and expressions provide the foundation for digital artists.

After describing motion capture as "a celebration of the actor-director moment", Cameron said, "Go to the other end of the spectrum (from motion capture) and you've got generative AI, where they can make up a character. They can make up an actor. They can make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. It's like, no. That's horrifying to me. That's the opposite. That's exactly what we're not doing."

Mentioning that AI is trained on things that are already in existence, Cameron said, "You will innately see, essentially, all of human art and human experience put into a blender, and you'll get something that is kind of an average of that. So what you can't have is that individual screenwriter's unique lived experience and their quirks. You won't find the idiosyncrasies of a particular actor."