"I warned you guys," says Hollywood director James Cameron.
More than 40 years since the first Terminator film was released, Cameron says the future it depicted is here.
"We are literally living out the precipice of what was science fiction back when I did it in the eighties," he told 7.30.
"It was science fiction [that] there could be an artificial super intelligence."
The multi Academy Award-winning director has talked about creating a new Terminator story but admits that AI is moving so fast it makes it hard to get ahead of the tech.
"I'm struggling with exactly how to tell a new Terminator story that won't be obsolete in a year," Cameron said.
But what really concerns him is the potential for AI to be weaponised.
"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," he said.
"It's not science fiction anymore."
For the director whose career has been built on technological advances in filmmaking, the prospect of "machine super intelligence" that far surpasses human intelligence is frightening.
"I don't think we're doing enough right now societally 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," he said.
No to AI actors and filmmakers
Cameron spoke to 7.30 from Los Angeles to promote the one-week cinema re-release of 'Avatar, The Way of Water', ahead of the anticipated December premier of the next instalment in the series called 'Fire and Ash'.
"It's a shameless ploy to get more money," Cameron joked before explaining he wants people who have only seen 'Avatar' on their televisions to get the full cinema experience.
"I make movies for the cinema. I believe in the cinema," he added.
Avatar 3 will open with a title card saying that no generative AI was used in the making of the film.
Cameron says he made a conscious choice early on not to rely on the nascent technology.
"Historically and inclusive of the new film that's coming out, not just the re-release of The Way of Water ... we haven't used any. I think people think we do, but we don't," he said.
"We use computers, but it's all artist driven. It's all actor driven and performance driven."
Cameron says generative AI has the power to redefine filmmaking and not necessarily for the better.
"You can create characters right now that are photographically plausible," he said.
"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, without basically without artists.
"I am so not interested in that."
However he wants the film industry to step in and protect the craft.
"I think we need to put massive guardrails on this new technology," he said.
"I think it needs to be done by Hollywood internally. I think government regulation would be just too much of a blunt instrument."
A VR future for Avatar
The idea for Avatar came to Cameron in a dream when he was just 19 years old.
"I had a dream of a bioluminescent forest," he told 7.30.
"I was so galvanised by the dream, I jumped up and I drew it.
"I drew what I had seen and it had moss that was glowing on the ground. When you stepped on it, ripples of light moved out.
"All the things that are actually in the first movie. Well, I didn't do anything with that, I just stuck the drawings in a file folder."
With Fire and Ash weeks away from a December release Cameron is already working on fourth and fifth instalments in the franchise.
Asked about how he thinks we'll be engaging with those future Avatar films, Cameron says virtual reality will transform the way we watch and make movies and television,
"I think you're gonna have an emerging new platform, which is gonna be VR and it's gonna be based on very small form factor, almost glasses," he said.
"And they have the brightness and the resolution to be competitive with the theatre experience and they're in 3D ... this will become a new player in the landscape, a new way to consume."
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