{"id":633126,"date":"2026-10-17T04:52:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T04:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/633126\/"},"modified":"2026-10-17T04:52:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T04:52:12","slug":"artlists-the-arc-tests-if-ai-can-make-a-sci-fi-series-for-38000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/633126\/","title":{"rendered":"Artlist’s ‘The Arc’ Tests If AI Can Make a Sci-Fi Series for $38,000"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a thing that always happens \u2014 you should take a drink, except no, you shouldn\u2019t \u2014 when the folks who work on short-form Generative AI<\/a> series speak about their work, as the team behind AI <\/a>platform Artlist\u2019s sci-fi miniseries \u201cThe Arc\u201d did to Business Insider<\/a>. The five-episode miniseries is ostensibly about a father trapped inside a sadistic future prison program who has to survive a series of wild historical battles in order to win a \u201ccure\u201d for his ailing son. But director Darin Stewart and producer Simone Ferretti stressed that these generative models democratize filmmaking, giving any creator access to shoot things that would be impossible outside a Christopher Nolan epic.<\/p>\n

\"SENSE<\/a> \"Alex<\/a> <\/p>\n

Cue the \u201cRatatouille\u201d quote. \u201cAnyone can cook.\u201d<\/p>\n

Artlist used to be a music and sound effects library, the kind creators could sign up to license assets for videos, podcasts, commercials, and the like at a higher quality than, say, the default Adobe Stock library, but not as intense or pricey as, say, APM. It\u2019s clearly hard out there for those hubs. Artlist has pivoted completely into AI, offering a suite of tools with tiered subscription plans for generating videos, images, and text. It has even launched a modest streaming platform with projects designed to showcase what\u2019s possible using the platform\u2019s access to video-generation models like Veo, Seedance, and Kling.<\/p>\n

Now, generative tools<\/a> are all over the production pipeline, and they were long in the pipeline before the worst people on Earth decided to burn the planet even faster with data centers. But to be clear about this, IndieWire agrees with Hayao Miyazaki<\/a>. The kind of AI videos fully done through generative models like Seedance and Kling, done without the individual or collaborative effort of humans actually creating a story from end to end, is without artistic merit and an insult to life itself. One need only read quotes from \u201cThe Arc\u201d team about how they would do \u201ca 10-minute verbal brain dump\u201d before throwing a hodgepodge of shot ideas, dialogue, and incidents into Claude to generate the anemic shadow of a script in order to see how shallow the human effort put into the project was.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s reflected in the visuals of the series, which are as unimaginative as the AI actor<\/a> renders are dead and inexpressive even before they\u2019re shot through with Tokugawa-era arrows. This is what happens when you delegate shot selection to the mushy midpoint of millions of stolen works, and operate within model limitations that certainly have grown by leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, but still cap individual prompt responses at eight seconds (Veo), or 30 seconds (Seedance).<\/p>\n

It sure seems like \u201cThe Arc\u2019s\u201d new version of the Torment Nexus is less about the agonizing limits of parental love caught in an exploitative system and more about the spectacle of doing \u201cSquid Game\u201d inside of several different AAA PlayStation titles. No one gave them the money to do something like this through traditional filmmaking because they weren\u2019t established in the film industry, of course. But even if they were, maybe no one gave them the money to do something like this before because \u2014 as expressed through AI videos anyway \u2014 they had nothing interesting to say.<\/p>\n

The Artlist proposition, though, is interesting, at least as a marketing hook for prospective storytellers: They, too, can prompt their way into making their cinematic dreams come true. \u201cThe Arc\u201d team was given $38,000 in AI credits to create the series \u2014 less money, it must be said, than Audible tends to spend on original audio series, let alone the budgets of television shows \u2014 spending about $7,600 in credits per episode. An AI Creator account tier on Artlist only costs consumers $500 on an annual plan and promises unlimited generations on select (often older) text, image, and video models. Whether a civilian could simply sign up for the right plan or work with Artlist on a custom business solution and generate something like \u201cThe Arc\u201d is the business proposition of hosting a series like it.<\/p>\n

So, can they?<\/p>\n

The answer is, honestly, \u201ckinda.\u201d Even just going off the back-of-the-napkin math of the API pricing (the amount companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic charge for individual prompts\/generative outputs), it\u2019s possible to generate 83 minutes of video within the budget of \u201cThe Arc.\u201d Working with the cable-esque bundle deal that Artlist has with these companies, you could probably deliver something at slightly lower resolution through the unlimited generations included in the AI Creator plan \u2014 although linking individual shots together might prove maddening without some custom plugins.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only the video that\u2019s expensive, too. Text generation is functionally free at this point, and the cost of image generation (to then be fed into video generation<\/a> prompts, of course) is cents on the dollar. Working on a prosumer plan on a platform like Artlist is indeed a way to make an un-greenlightable series.<\/p>\n

It may be even more tragic that that\u2019s the case. The team behind \u201cThe Arc\u201d went out of their way to stress that everyone who worked on the project was paid a full day rate, as they would\u2019ve been on a set. Great. But fewer people, working faster, with fewer monetary resources, leads to the deskilling of entertainment and its transformation into the sole province of the independently wealthy\/their nephews, not the proliferation of new storytellers from all walks of life. \u201cThe Arc\u201d proves it\u2019s possible for a team paid less than that to do it. That may be the most dystopian thing about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a thing that always happens \u2014 you should take a drink, except no, you shouldn\u2019t \u2014 when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":633127,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,7671,363,364,111,139,69,145,90832,7651],"class_list":["post-633126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-tools","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology","tag-top-of-the-line","tag-video-generation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/633127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}