Arnold Schwarzenegger says AI has proven the 'Terminator' films right

“It’s not any more fantasy or kind of futuristic. It is here today,” says the actor who first became a movie star for embodying artificial intelligence on the big screen.

Christian Holub

Arnold Schwarzenegger became famous for embodying artificial intelligence on screen. Now that new generative software like ChatGPT has seemingly made “A.I.” a modern reality, the actor can’t help but look back on his iconic work with director James Cameron on the Terminator films.

“Today, everyone is frightened of it, of where this is gonna go,” Schwarzenegger said of AI on Wednesday at an event at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, according to PEOPLE. “And in this movie, in Terminator, we talk about the machines becoming self-aware and they take over.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger in ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ (1991)

| Credit: A. Rapoport/Tri-Star

When The Terminator was released in 1984, Schwarzenegger’s portrayal of the titular killer robot from the future helped make him a movie star, even though society had only just “scratched the surface of A.I.,” according to the star.

Schwarzenegger continued, “Now over the course of decades, it has become a reality. So it’s not any more fantasy or kind of futuristic. It is here today. And so this is the extraordinary writing of Jim Cameron.”

What inspired Cameron’s eerily prescient vision of the future? When EW compiled an oral history of The Terminator in 2014 for the film’s 30th anniversary, the director said he was inspired by a particularly vivid nightmare.

“Nightmares are a business asset; that’s the way I look at it,” Cameron said. “I was sick, I was broke, I had a high fever, and I had a dream about this metal death figure coming out of a fire. And the implication was that it had been stripped of its skin by the fire and exposed for what it really was. When I have some particularly vivid image, I’ll draw it or I’ll write some notes, and that goes on to this day.”

Cameron added, “The Terminator themes had been important to me since high school: Those apocalyptic visions, ideas about our love/hate relationship with technology, our tendency as a species to move in a direction that might ultimately destroy us, and a central faith in the resourcefulness of humanity. Those are motifs that have gone through all my films.”