Enlarge / Film director James Cameron.
On Tuesday, Stability AI announced that James Cameron, the film director of Terminator and Skynet fame, had joined its board of directors. Stability is best known for its pioneering yet highly controversial AI image synthesis model, the Stability Diffusion series, which was first released in 2022 and can generate images based on text descriptions.
“Throughout my career, I have sought out new technologies that push the boundaries of what’s possible, all in the name of telling great stories,” Cameron said in a statement. “I was at the forefront of CGI more than 30 years ago and have been at the forefront ever since. Now, the intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave.”
While Cameron is best known as the director of blockbuster films such as Avatar, Titanic, and Alien, he may be best known in the AI world as the co-creator of the character Skynet, a fictional AI system that sparks nuclear war and dominates humanity in the Terminator media franchise. Similar fears of AI taking over the world have since become reality, sparking recent attempts to regulate the risks of AI systems’ existence through measures such as California’s SB-1047.
In a 2023 interview with CTV News, when asked about the dangers of AI, Cameron said, “I warned you in 1984, but you didn’t listen,” referring to the year the movie “The Terminator” was released. “I think the biggest danger is the weaponization of AI. I think we’re going to end up in the equivalent of a nuclear arms race with AI. If we don’t make it, someone else will, and that’s going to escalate.”
Hollywood goes AI
Of course, Stability AI isn’t making AI-controlled weapons — rather, Cameron appears to have joined the company out of an interest in cutting-edge filmmaking technology.
“James Cameron lives in the future, and he’s waiting for us to catch up,” said Prem Akkaraju, CEO of Stability. “At Stability AI, our mission is to transform visual media for the next century by providing creators with a full-stack AI pipeline to bring their ideas to life. Having a technical and creative visionary like James at the highest levels of our company gives us an unparalleled advantage to achieve this goal. This is a monumental statement not only for Stability AI, but for the entire AI industry.”
Cameron is one of several recent additions to Stability AI’s board of directors, including former Facebook president and current chairman Sean Parker, who called Cameron’s appointment “the beginning of a new chapter” for the company.
Despite a major outcry from actors’ unions last year, parts of Hollywood seem to be slowly embracing generative AI. Last Wednesday, we covered a deal between Lionsgate and AI video generation company Runway to create custom AI models for film productions. In March, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI was actively showing off its Sora video synthesis model to studio executives.
Unstable times for stable AI
Cameron’s appointment to Stability AI’s board comes at a turbulent time for the company, which has faced a series of challenges over the past year, including an ongoing copyright class action lawsuit, the launch of its troubled Stable Diffusion 3 model, significant changes in management and staff, and ongoing financial concerns.
In March, founder and CEO Emad Mostaque resigned, followed by a series of layoffs. This followed the departure of three key engineers: Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz, who have since founded Black Forest Labs and released a new open-weight image compositing model called Flux, which has begun to take Reddit’s r/StableDiffusion community by storm.
Despite these issues, Stability AI claims that its models are widely used, with Stable Diffusion having been downloaded more than 150 million times, and the company says that thousands of companies use its models in their creative workflows.
Indeed, Stable Diffusion has spawned a large community of open-weight AI image enthusiasts online, but it has also been controversial among some artists because Stability initially trained its models on hundreds of millions of images it harvested from the internet without seeking licenses or permission to use them.
Apparently the connection isn’t a concern for Cameron, based on his statement: “The convergence of these two very different creation engines – CGI and generative AI – will give artists new ways to tell stories in ways never before imagined, and Stability AI is poised to lead this transformation.”
