It’s 2033. You’re a concept artist in London, building a video game with a team of people scattered across the globe.
The game looks mind-blowing. It’s powered by Unreal Engine 12, a hybrid art and AI platform capable of generating photorealistic graphics in real-time on the PlayStation 9 (teleport yours today). The physics are near-perfect, and the non-player characters can hold emotion-driven, open-ended conversations, while still gently guiding players back to the main quest.
Ten years ago, you would have needed a team of 5,000 people to build this game. You’re doing it with 100. But this new efficiency hasn’t meant less work for people like you. It’s meant more games — a lot more. Instead of releasing 10 to 20 AAA titles a year like it used to, the industry now ships over a thousand.
Welcome to the age of industrialized imagination. To understand how we got here, we have to roll back the clock to the turbulent 2020s, when AI first entered the creative world and fear dominated the conversation.
The broken lens
The entertainment industry is broken, with the biggest players groaning under the weight of their own success.
Hollywood hit a cost ceiling so high it now scrapes the stratosphere. A tentpole film routinely gulps $200-$300 million in production costs before marketing budgets even come into play. Most of these flicks have to earn $500 million or more just to break even.
It’s even worse in the gaming industry. Production budgets for top-tier video games can soar past even those eye-watering film numbers. Sony’s “Spider-Man 2” tipped the scales at roughly $315 million, while a single “Call of Duty” entry can chew through $700 million.
The creative pipeline has a bottleneck so tight that artists are suffocating.
When you’re gambling with that much money, you don’t take risks. You can’t afford to — the price of failure is corporate beheading.
So, if you’re an entertainment industry exec who wants to keep their job, you’re not going to gamble on the strange or the sublime. Risk is the enemy. Instead, you’re going to clone what already works. You greenlight “John Wick,” but with a chick. You order up “Fast and Furious 14: The Search for More Money.” You remake a classic, hoping nostalgia will cover for a lack of new ideas.
Even prestige TV bows to the accountant’s whip. Amazon finally found its stride with its adaptation of “The Wheel of Time” in a muscular third season, but swung the axe anyway because it didn’t want very good — it wanted a global phenomenon, with once-in-a-generation storytelling, like “Game of Thrones.”
Streaming has contributed to entertainment’s downfall in many ways. People used to buy physical copies of the flicks they loved best. Streaming is better for consumers because we get access to a lot more content for a lot less money, but producers got a second financial wind from DVD and VHS sales, and that revenue helped offset production costs — essentially, every film had two major release dates, and now it doesn’t.
This is not a healthy creative ecosystem. The pipeline has a bottleneck so tight that artists are suffocating. The entertainment industry has become a gilded cage, one that produces ever-more-expensive retreads of existing stories for an audience hungry for something — anything — new.
Art vs. the algorithm
Into this stagnation comes a wrecking ball: artificial intelligence.
There’s now an AI tool for seemingly every step of the creative process in entertainment. ChatGPT can write screenplays and code video games. DALL-E can generate storyboards and concept art. Veo 3 and Runway can turn those assets into videos.
Cue the screaming headlines about the end of art and mass unemployment among creatives. Artists are panicking. Writers, musicians, and digital effects artists are worried that they are on the verge of being automated into oblivion. In 2023, the major actors unions went on strike — the potential use of generative AI to replicate human performers was a core point of dispute during contract negotiations.
Overhyped AI demo reels are only fueling their fears. Every time a new AI-generated video makes the rounds on social media, the comments from pundits light up the airways: “This is insane! Hollywood is cooked! Everyone will make movies for nothing!”
But look closer at those “Hollywood is cooked” videos, like the below minute-long clip created by AI startup founder Dave Clark using Google Flow. The interior space is physically wrong. The people shift around inside the car like they’ve got a football field of breathing room. The rifle shooting scenes are abysmal. The characters are shooting at nothing or shooting each other. The faces are deep in the uncanny valley.
AI-generated videos — especially ones that were reportedly created in “just X hours!” — are almost universally awful. They’re often lifeless, stuffed with clichés and pointless shots and bad camerawork because the people making them don’t know when to use a medium close-up and when to opt for a low-angle shot. The camera work is flat, the dialogue is banal, and the pacing is non-existent.
That’s because AI is nothing but a set of phenomenally powerful tools. It is not the creative spirit. It is not the storyteller. It is an amplifier, a collaborator, a tireless assistant. Generative models vaporize drudgery. They draft code, rough in lighting, and crank out a hundred variant mech suits before the coffee cools. But they don’t know why a Dutch tilt unsettles the stomach or how to pace a joke so it detonates. That spark is still human.
Yes, these tools are evolving at a staggering pace. AI-generated videos are already looking better and better. Genie 3 can generate playable 3D worlds that look amazing and adhere to real physics. Epic Games recently demonstrated real-time motion capture without a motion-capture suit, translating an actor’s live performance onto a digital avatar instantly.
But how do you know that what Genie 9 generates is actually fun to play? How do you know that the levels don’t have a bunch of pitfalls where players get stuck? You don’t unless someone who understands what makes a game playable and fun verifies and validates and guides the output.
When the price of failure drops from $200 million to $20 million, or even $200,000, risk becomes your friend again.
Instead of imagining AI just doing everything and putting us all out of work, instead imagine a hybrid workflow. An actor performs on a real set, but the background is a fluid, AI-generated landscape that can be changed on the fly. You film a scene, but in post-production, you “reshoot” it from a different angle generated by an AI that understands 3D space, saving you a fortune on reshoots. A director can modify an actor’s voice in real-time, searching for the perfect tone. The actor gets final sign-off and still gets paid. When the script gets rewritten, the director “reshoots” the performance on the fly in a hybrid AI platform.
The true revolution with AI in entertainment is the collapse of cost. When the price of failure drops from $200 million to $20 million, or even $200,000, risk becomes your friend again. Cheaper creation doesn’t kill careers; it multiplies them. The future of filmmaking and gaming isn’t a world without artists. It’s a world where artists can do more, faster, and cheaper than ever before. Some folks have the idea that once everyone can make any video or story in an instant, you don’t need creative people any more. Everyone will become a filmmaker or writer or game designer, generating whatever they want to see on the fly!
But this is total nonsense. The vast majority of people do not have the desire, the talent, the patience, or the skill to make a movie or a game, and that’s alright. Entrepreneurs and artists are a small fraction of the population — they always have been and always will be. It will still take immensely talented people to make anything that anyone actually wants to watch or play and pay for.
No matter how good AI gets, artists and filmmakers and game designers will still be just a minority of the population — the people who possess the desire, talent, patience, and skill to create a box-office hit or even an indie game that breaks even through Steam downloads will still be the ones to drive the next generation of breakout entertainment. The rest of the population will just be making fan fiction, bringing half-baked ideas to life for personal amusement.
We’ve seen this movie before
We don’t have to look too far back for an example of another technology that was supposed to kill a creative industry: the eBook.
When the Kindle was released in 2007, authors and publishers panicked: Now that anyone could publish a book, quality work would be lost in the flood of releases. To have any hope of having their work read, “serious writers” would be forced to cut prices so low, they wouldn’t be able to make a living (never mind that “serious writers” back then kept 10% of the profits from their hard work, while the gatekeepers kept 90%.)
Did we drown in dreck? Absolutely. Pick any genre you love on Amazon, and you’ll find a hundred ugly book covers and badly written slop stories. Long before AI was cranking out slop, people were doing it just fine. But we also got “The Martian,” “Wool,” “Still Alice,” and a flood of wild and wonderful new voices that stood out because they were good. And now, self-published authors routinely keep 50-70% of profits when they get picked up by traditional publishers.
More stories is better than fewer stories.
AI will lower the cost of getting ideas out of the heads of wannabe film and gamemakers the same way e-publishing lowered the cost of getting written stories out of the heads of wannabe novelists. Again, when the price of failure drops, risk-taking and new ideas take off.
Studio execs will be able to take a chance on that weird, niche story. They can make that experimental sci-fi film. They can adapt that sprawling fantasy series and give it the time it needs to grow an audience. The greenlight can finally shine on Afrofuturist Westerns, cosmic horror rom-coms, and musicals set inside simulated afterlives.
Games will follow the same curve. Budgets will shrink, while ambition swells. Starving indies in Lagos will launch polished cyber-myths to global storefronts. A high school trio in Manila will ship an interactive telenovela that forwards itself over WhatsApp. Cultural monoculture fractures — at last.
Sure, not all of it will work, but that’s the brutal and beautiful paradox of abundance: Lower the cost of creation, and you get more trash and more treasure. The upside dwarfs the downside. More stories is better than fewer stories.
AI isn’t going to kill the entertainment industry, but it will end the creative bottleneck.
We are on the cusp of a creative renaissance that will mirror the e-publishing revolution.
It won’t lead to fewer working artists; it will lead to more. More filmmakers will be empowered to bring their unique visions to life because they won’t need an exec to bet their career that it is going to make as much at the box office as the last Marvel movie. More game developers will bring their creations to market because they’ll be able to do so with a team numbering in the hundreds, not the thousands.
AI isn’t going to kill the entertainment industry, but it will end the creative bottleneck.
When today’s artists see what the latest AI can do, they often panic. But tomorrow’s kids? They’ll view AI the same way we do computers and smartphones: just another tool. When you tell them using AI to make art was once controversial, they’ll look at you like you have two heads before turning back to whatever hybrid AI tool they’re using in 2033.
This is the dawn of the era of the industrialized imagination.
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