On the face of it, the filmmaker James Cameron seems to have changed his mind about AI. Just over a year ago, the director of The Terminator, Avatar and Titanic was concerned that the tech was a danger to humanity. Now he's joined the board of Stability AI, the company behind the open-source AI image generator Stable Diffusion.
But it isn't necessarily the about-turn that it might seem. AI is a vast area of technology that's being applied to everything from defence to health care. When Cameron spoke of the dangers of AI, he wasn't specifically referring to generative AI for imagery and video. And it was perhaps inevitable that a director who's always aimed to be at the cutting edge of tech would be interested in how AI could change filmmaking, if only to maintain his reputation as an innovator. But it does set up something of a battle in the industry.
