James Cameron Warns That AI Actors Like Tilly Norwood Are a Chilling Preview

James Cameron is the guy who spent the 80s and 90s yelling at us about killer robots, and now he says reality is moving so fast he can barely keep up with it on the page. The short version: he wants to do a new Terminator, but AI is evolving so quickly he is worried anything he writes will look outdated by the time it hits a screen.

Where Cameron is right now with AI and Terminator

• He says he is struggling to start a new Terminator script because real-world AI news keeps overtaking any sci-fi angle he thinks up. His take: we are already living in the sci-fi era.
• On CBS' Sunday Morning, while promoting Avatar: Fire and Ash, he drew a hard line between the performance-capture tech he uses and the idea of fully AI-generated actors.
• He pointed back to the first Avatar, when people thought photo-real CG characters meant actors were done. In his view, that work is actually built around actors and the actor-director collaboration, not a replacement for them.
• Now, with the recent Tilly Norwood dust-up about AI-made performers in the mix, he is flat-out alarmed by where generative AI could go.

'Go to the other end of the spectrum and you have generative AI, where they can make up a character, make up an actor, make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. No. That is horrifying to me.'

Why this hits different coming from the Avatar guy

This is the very industry-nerd part: a couple of months ago, Cameron sounded relatively calm about AI. Working inside the Avatar machine, he said the creative culture among the VFX artists is so strong that sometimes he can approve a shot on first review because the team already knows the storytelling rules of that world. In other words, iteration after iteration has trained a human pipeline to think like filmmakers, not button-pushers. His belief then: generative tools are not going to replace that, because artists need to stay in control of the process.

So what changed?

The line he is drawing now is between tools that extend what actors do (performance capture, CG characters built on real performances) and tools that skip actors entirely (text-to-actor, text-to-performance). The first is collaboration. The second, in his words, is the opposite. And that is why the Terminator problem is suddenly thorny: the future he warned us about is not theoretical anymore, which makes writing fresh fiction about it a moving target.