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Council Post: Why AI In Media And Entertainment Can Help Creatives Get Funded
Jerry Tang is CEO of Atlas Cloud, providing enterprises and creators access to the leading generative AI models across all modalities.
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The loudest fear about using generative AI in media and entertainment has been that it replaces the creative talent who generate art, production or ad campaigns.
However, AI could be the best thing that has happened to talented artistic professionals with a real vision but no track record, because it dismantles the two barriers that have kept them out of work: the cost of production and the risk that only proven names are worth the bet.
In other words, more creatives could be about to get their projects funded.
As CEO of an AI inference provider specializing in generative media, I am seeing this trend emerge in our enterprise deals with creative agencies and movie studios, so I wanted to share how I see it evolving.
The Bankability Trap
Media has always been a high-fixed-cost business with famously unpredictable returns. A film, a season of content or a national ad campaign costs a fortune to produce, and nobody can reliably predict how it will land.
Faced with that math, the rational business move was to de-risk the only way one could: Bet on the bankable. The director with the track record, the star with the opening weekend and the experienced pair of hands were safer bets, not as a result of a verdict on taste or production quality, but a verdict on downside.
These dynamics have quietly cannibalized the media industry for decades. The handful of bankable names grew more valuable, while a generation of creatives with stranger, more original, untested ideas never got a foot in the door. No studio wants to take risks, so they have in some ways removed themselves from the art of creative vision.
The barrier was not a shortage of talent or ideas, as these exist in droves in the form of quality art degrees and film majors, amazingly talented actors and scriptwriters hoping for their opportunity in the next casting call. The barrier to their success has always been pure economics: A single failure can cost a studio too much to risk on someone unproven, and so an industry that could only afford to bet on sure things slowly starved itself of new ones.
How AI Changes The Ecosystem
This entire structure rested on one assumption: Making great things is expensive.
However, AI has now reached the point of being "good enough" to be treated as a production tool. As proof, consider that some of the most demanding, most reputation-sensitive players in media are already creating with AI. Here are a few examples from just the last 18 months:
• Netflix shipped its first generative AI final footage in a released series, a sequence its co-CEO said was finished 10 times faster than traditional effects allowed. Not a demo, footage that aired to paying subscribers.
• Google took a $75 million stake in A24 to build an AI research lab inside the studio, its first equity position in a film company.
• Amazon's Prime Video greenlit three animated series under a fund built to bankroll creators making them with AI production tools.
• WPP consolidated its entire global production operation, of close to 10,000 people across 40-plus cities, into a single platform built on generative AI and virtual production, pitched to clients on faster turnaround and lower cost.
• Coca-Cola's almost entirely AI holiday ad in 2024 cut the production timeline from a year to a month. Despite backlash, they ran a “refreshed and optimized version” of the ad the next season anyway.
This could evolve into the AWS moment for creative talent. When cloud computing made it cheap to start a company, investors stopped funding only proven founders and began seeding hundreds of unproven ones.
When failure is the mother of creation and AI makes it cheap to fail, we will see an explosion of new ideas previously considered too risky to invest in.
Why The Economics Shift In The Creator’s Favor
A movie ticket is still $15. If a film costs one-tenth as much to make, the budget that once funded one motion picture now funds 10. Five can flop, four can do fine and one can break out and earn what the single big bet used to. You are raising your at-bat rate, and every extra swing is one you can now afford to hand to someone unproven.
This process has already happened in other mediums. Books used to be incredibly expensive projects when scribes were necessary to transcribe copies for distribution. Then came the Gutenberg press; after that, came the internet. With each advance in technology, barriers came down for more writers to get a chance to prove themselves. AI will do the same for visual media.
None of this comes without friction. For instance, the question of rights is still unsettled, with uncertainty over who owns what a model produces and what a studio can actually license.
More importantly, audiences can tell the difference between content made with good taste and something merely generated as "AI slop." There will be moments where studios try to get away with AI-only initiatives only to realize they still need the judgment of experienced creatives. I often find myself explaining this to prospective customers: Giving you a race car means little when you have no good driver.
As a result, creatives have a massive opportunity: They have good judgment about what to keep. For every creative out there with a story to tell and no résumé, I want you to know I sympathize with your painful journey. But I also want to advise you to explore how AI can dismantle barriers that have kept you out: the cost, the risk and the demand that you already be proven.
For the studios, agencies and brands doing the funding, the play is no longer to bank the savings or chase the same bankable names. Instead, it is to take more swings, put the bat in more talented hands and keep the taste to know a hit when you see it.
The next generation of great work will come from people the old math would never have funded.
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