Iconic CGI Artist Says Soon There'll Be a Totally AI-Generated Movie

"....you’re dealing with a weapon."

Deep Fake

With actors and writers on strike and protesting against artificial intelligence as an existential threat to their livelihoods, a CGI pioneer who worked on iconic movies such as James Cameron's "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" predicts there will be a completely AI movie in the future that will fool everybody, according to a new interview with Metro.

Steve Williams, a big name in VFX history, likened the hypothetical scenario to Orson Welles' famous radio play "The War of the Worlds," which fooled some people into thinking that an alien invasion was actually underway.

"The litmus test will be like a 'War Of the Worlds' scenario," Williams told the news outlet. "If you remember the 1938 broadcast, with Orson Welles and aliens are attacking and everyone’s freaking out — they didn’t tell you [it was fake]."

In the interview, Williams claims to have been prescient about the use of CGI and AI, including predicting the use of deepfakes of politicians.

"That’s why I referred to it in my early interviews in the early ‘90s and said you’re dealing with a weapon," he said.

He also claims to have predicted the use of AI to resurrect dead actors.

"I warned about it because you get into artists’ rights at that point," he said.

Future Weird

Besides "Terminator 2," Williams has worked on other iconic movies such as Jurassic Park, which is famous for its CGI dinosaurs, and Cameron's "The Abyss," which featured otherworldy CGI of water sculpted to look like people's faces. So he knows what he's talking about.

Other Hollywood people, like director Joe Russo, have said that there will be AI-generated movies in the future and viewers can plug in their own avatars alongside, say, Marilyn Monroe, in a movie that is generated from just prompts. Kind of like Dall-E on steroids.

But there are some hurdles with all these scenarios: real-life actors and writers protesting having their appearance and stories owned by corporations without getting compensated, the amount of energy and water it takes to generate AI content, and the fact that AI still has trouble with hands!

However it all shakes out, the future is going to be weird.

More on AI movies: Marvel Director Expects Fully AI-Generated Movies Within Two Years