There’s one thing that always happens — you should have a drink, except you shouldn’t — when people working on short-form generative AI series talk about their work, as did the team behind AI platform Artlist’s sci-fi miniseries “The Ark.” business insider. The five-episode miniseries is ostensibly about a father trapped inside a sadistic futuristic prison scheme who must survive a series of wild epic battles to secure a “cure” for his sick son. But director Darin Stewart and producer Simon Ferretti insist that these generic models democratize filmmaking, giving any producer the flexibility to shoot things that would be impossible outside of a Christopher Nolan epic.
Cue “Ratatouille” quote. “Anyone can cook.”
Artlist used to be a music and sound effects library, this type of creator could sign up to license videos, podcasts, commercials, and similar assets at higher quality than the default Adobe Stock library, but not as intense or expensive as APM. It is obviously difficult for those centres. Artlist is completely AI-driven, offering a suite of tools for creating videos, images, and text, along with tiered membership plans. It has also launched a modest streaming platform with projects designed to show what’s possible using the platform’s access to video-generation models like Vo, SeeDance, and Cling.
Now, generative tools are all in the production pipeline, and they were in the pipeline for a long time, before the worst people on Earth decided to burn the planet with data centers even faster. But to be clear, IndieWire agrees with Hayao Miyazaki. AI videos created entirely through generative models like Seedance and Cling, without the individual or collaborative effort of humans to actually create a story from end to end, are without artistic merit and an insult to life. One need only read quotes from “The Ark” team talking about how they would do a “10-minute verbal brain dump” before throwing a medley of shot ideas, dialogue and events into the cloud to generate an anemic shadow of a script to see how shallow the human effort put into the project was.
This is reflected in the series’ visuals, which are as unimaginative as the AI actor presenters are dead and inexpressive before being shot with Tokugawa-era arrows. This is what happens when you delegate shot selection to the soft midpoint of millions of stolen actions, and work within model limitations that have certainly grown by leaps and bounds over the years, but still limit individual quick reactions to eight seconds (VO), or 30 seconds (Cedance).
It certainly seems like Torment Nexus’ new version of “The Ark” is less about the painful limits of parental love trapped in an exploitative system and more about the spectacle of doing a “squid game” inside several different AAA PlayStation titles. No one gave them money to do something like this through traditional film production because they certainly weren’t established in the film industry. But even if they were, perhaps no one had paid them to do something like this in the first place because – as expressed through AI videos – they had nothing interesting to say.
However, Artlist’s proposal is interesting, at least as a marketing hook for would-be storytellers: they, too, can suggest their own path to realizing their cinematic dreams. “The Ark” team was given $38,000 in AI credits to create the series – it must be said, less money than Audible spends on an original audio series, let alone the budget of a television show – spending about $7,600 in credits per episode. An AI Creator account tier on Artlist costs consumers just $500 on an annual plan and is promised unlimited generations on select (often older) text, image, and video models. Whether a citizen can sign up for the right plan or work with Artlist on a custom business solution and create something like “The Ark”, there is a business proposition for hosting such a series.
So, can they do it?
The answer, honestly, is “a little bit.” Even leaving behind the napkin math of API pricing (the amount companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic charge for individual signals/generative outputs), it’s possible to create an 83-minute video within the budget of “The Ark.” Working with the cable-esque bundle deals that Artlist has with these companies, you can potentially deliver something at a slightly lower resolution via the unlimited generations included in the AI Creator plan — though stitching together individual shots may prove tough without some custom plugins.
It is only the video which is also expensive. At this point text generation is functionally free, and the cost of image generation (to be fed into the video generation prompt, of course) is cents on the dollar. Working on a consumer plan on a platform like Artlist is actually a way to create a non-greenlightable series.
It may be even more sad that this is the case. The team behind “The Ark” insisted that everyone working on the project be paid for a full day, as they would have been on a set. Great. But with fewer people, working faster, with less monetary resources, the entertainment sector collapses and turns into the sole province of the independently wealthy/their nephews, rather than a proliferation of new storytellers from all walks of life. “The Ark” proves that it is possible for an underpaid team to do this. This may be the most dystopian thing about it.