AI Ate Production
FILTER/3: But It Has No Taste
More content is now created every 48 hours than the first 100 years of cinema.
That should feel like progress right? But it doesn’t. Because one of the clearest signals of what’s happening next is a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. Admittedly it’s not an award-winning performance, but in the world of AI and production it’s had a profound impact.
Will (or a very bad version of him) and a plate full of spaghetti were at odds, with hilarious outcomes. It was like watching a wax version of Will attempting to eat spaghetti while the universe forgot how mouths, spaghetti, and physics are supposed to work. However, it fast became the benchmark for AI generated content with each iteration improving over time.
The most recent output, about two years later was good enough to fool most viewers. Here was Will Smith, his hands, mouth and spaghetti working in perfect unison, while sipping on OJ. The sonics from slurp to bite were orchestrated to deliver a believable output. While it still isn’t perfect, it’s not far off.
The catch? We’ve downgraded our instincts from ‘that’s unusable’ to ‘that’ll do.’
Not because standards improved… but because the system rewards ‘good enough’ at scale. And in today’s world, scale wins.
Spaghetti compilation from 2023 - 2025
Production, Rewritten
What used to be a well-known sequence: script, casting, shooting, editing and distribution all played out over months and years is quietly becoming something else.
Now it looks like prompting, generating, refining and deploying. A process that can be done in days, sometimes hours. No studio needed just software and judgement.
While craft has not disappeared, the dependency on it has. And increasingly, that software is getting better at an alarming rate. Tools like Runway Gen-3, Pika and Sora are collapsing what used to be entire production pipelines into a single interface.
What once required crews, now requires prompts.
And it doesn’t stop with studios. We’re seeing acts of creative rebellion where fandoms and frustrated moviegoers take the edit into their own hands, reworking iconic moments into something entirely different. Imagined film trailers are all the rage, with output often being indistinguishable from the real thing.
From alternate cuts where Thanos wipes out everyone in Infinity War,
to reimagined endings of Titanic where Jack and Rose both make it out alive. The big platforms have been forced to act.
YouTube has started to ban popular channels that created fake AI movie trailers..
The Land Grab
This isn’t just one race, it’s several, with multiple players.
The Model Makers: competing to own the cost and capability of imagination.
The Production Replacers: collapsing editing, VFX, and generation into a single, continuous workflow.
The Interface Layer: the quiet kingmakers.
Because once creation becomes instant, intuitive and habitual, it stops feeling like production. Instead, it feels like thinking out loud.
And when production becomes easy, execution is no longer the differentiator. The value shifts away from simply making things toward choosing what to make, from craft alone to perspective, and from scale to meaning. The real advantage is no longer in creating, but in deciding what’s actually worth creating.
Where Humans Still Win
Yes, AI undoubtedly removes friction, it’s brilliant for speed and slightly dangerous for meaning.
But culture has never really been built on ease. It’s built on tension. and on things that almost didn’t work. On decisions that cost something: budgets, judgement, failure, and those impromptu moments from talent and directors that no one could plan.
Real production still carries outputs machines struggle to fake. Proof that something actually happened, in the real world, in your neighbourhood. The buzz of a live shoot and the economic ripple it creates. Constraint that shapes identity and intent that says someone cared enough to do it properly.
And that choice, increasingly, is the point.
Because audiences don’t attach to perfection. They attach to friction, to imperfection and to the moments that feel unplanned, slightly off and human.
The Moment That Wasn’t in the Script
The Risk / The Opportunity
In a world of infinite content generation, we risk building content without consequence. Things that look right, feel right, perform right… but don’t belong to anything. With no spine, no memory and no ownership. Just perfectly formed noise in an infinite sea of noise, often fleeting and forgettable.
The ones who understand this won’t just make content, they’ll create meaning. Where every output feeds something bigger than itself. Where every iteration strengthens recognition, where audiences don’t just watch… they return, because they’re invested. Worlds they can step into and eventually, buy into.
The Signal
Production isn’t disappearing, but its role is undoubtedly shifting, quickly.
For directors, producers, commissioners, this isn’t a threat to craft. It’s a shift in where the value sits. Because when anything can be made quickly and cheaply, the question is no longer “Can we produce this?” It’s “Should this exist?”
Craft still matters, more than ever. But now it has to do more than impress, it has to justify itself, signal intent, and prove something needed to be made properly.
It’s a bit like photography after the smartphone. When everyone got a camera, taking a picture stopped being the skill. Knowing what to capture, and why, became the difference.
None of this is entirely new. But in a world of infinite output, effort becomes meaning. The future isn’t less production, it’s more intentional production and that can only be a good thing.