James Cameron: Skynet Would Destroy Humanity With Deepfakes, Not Nukes

The Terminator director warns about the dangers of disinformation and AI-generated phony videos.

By Michael Kan

25 Jan 2022

 If machines ever rise up to overthrow humanity, expect them to use deepfakes, not nukes, to take down our society, says James Cameron, the filmmaker behind the Terminator franchise. 

“All Skynet would have to do is just deepfake a bunch of people, pit them against each other, stir up a lot of foment, and just run this giant deepfake on humanity,” Cameron told The BBC in an interview last week. 

He brought up the topic while discussing the threat of AI-generated “deepfake” videos, which can manipulate someone’s face to say something else. Cameron fears the same technology could be abused to cause political chaos or start a war. To make his point, he referenced Skynet, the evil artificial intelligence from the Terminator franchise, which originally wipes out half of humanity through a nuclear strike. 

   

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If Skynet ever emerges in our world, Cameron thinks the evil AI could plot humanity’s downfall rather easily by creating seemingly realistic, but ultimately fake videos, to fool people into hating one another.  “It would actually look a lot like what's going on right now,” he said, alluding to how disinformation and conspiracy theories can easily go viral in our digital age. 

James Cameron

“[Skynet is] not going to have to like wipe out the entire, you know, biosphere and environment with nuclear weapons to do it. It's going to be so much easier and less energy required to just turn our minds against ourselves,” he said. 

Cameron isn’t alone in warning the public about deepfakes. For years, security experts and lawmakers have also sounded the alarm about AI-generated videos posing a national security threat. Cameron added that deepfakes exploit how video evidence can often convince us something is true. 

“This is the great problem with us relying on video. The news cycles happen so fast, and people respond so quickly, you could have a major incident take place between the interval between when the deepfake drops and when it's exposed as a fake,” he said. 

Currently, many deepfakes can still be outed as artificial due to flaws in the video rendering. “But over time, those limitations will go away," Cameron warned. "Things that you see and fully believe you're seeing could be faked.”

In response, he’s urging the public to use critical thinking skills, but to also avoid embracing “ridiculous conspiracy paranoia" when examining the news.

“People in the science community don't just go, 'Oh that's great!' when some scientist, you know, publishes their results. No, you go in for this big period of peer review. It's got to be vetted and checked. And the more radical a finding, the more peer review there is,” he said. "So good peer-reviewed science can't lie. But people's minds, for some reason, will go to the sexier, more thriller-movie interpretation of reality than the obvious one."

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