Can AI make a sci-fi series for $38,000? Artlist's The Arc puts it to the test
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could or not that they didn't think about whether they should.
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Something that always happens—you should have a drink, except no, you shouldn't—when the people working on the Generative AI short series talk about their work, as the team behind Artlist's AI platform sci-fi miniseries "The Arc" did with Business Insider. The five-episode miniseries is ostensibly about a father trapped in a sadistic futuristic prison program who must survive a series of brutal historical battles to obtain a "cure" for his sick son. But director Darren Stewart and producer Simon Ferty emphasized that these generative models democratize filmmaking, allowing any filmmaker to film things that would be impossible outside of a Christopher Nolan epic. Related Stories "Sense and Sense" Clothes A Love Letter to Steal Your Sister's Dress Alex Gibney on how a CGI avatar helped him simulate the Elon Musk interview he could never get.
Show the "Ratatouille" quote. "Anyone can cook."
Now, productivity tools are all over the production pipeline, and they've been in the pipeline for a long time before the worst people on Earth decided to burn the planet even faster with data centers. But to clarify, IndieWire agrees with Hayao Miyazaki. The kind of AI videos done entirely through generative models like Seedance and Kling, without the individual or collaborative effort of humans to actually create a story from end to end, is without artistic merit and an affront to life itself. We only need to read the lines from the Ark team about how they did a "10-minute verbal brain dump" before throwing a barrage of ideas, dialogue, and events at Cloud to create an anemic shadow of the script to see just how shallow the human effort was on the project.
This is reflected in the series' visuals, which are as unimaginative as the AI actors are dead and inexpressive even before they're shot with Tokugawa-era arrows. That's what happens when you leave scene selection in the crowded middle of millions of stolen works, and operate within the constraints of a model that has certainly grown dramatically in the last few years, but still limit individual immediate responses to eight seconds (Veo) or 30 seconds (Seedance).
Torment Nexus' new version of "The Arc" certainly seems to be less about the painful limits of parental love trapped in an exploitative system and more about the spectacle of playing the "squid game" across a few different AAA PlayStation titles. Nobody paid them to do that through traditional filmmaking, because of course they didn't fit into the film industry. But even if they were, maybe no one had paid them to do such a thing before because - as expressed through the AI videos anyway - they had nothing interesting to say.
Honestly, the answer is "several". Even if you don't use the main API pricing calculations (the amount companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic charge for individual requests/production outputs), you can produce 83 minutes of video on The Arc's budget. Working with the cable bundle that Artlist has with these companies, you can probably render something at a slightly lower resolution via the unlimited generations included in the AI Creator scheme – although linking individual photos together can be crazy without some custom plugins.
It is only the video that is expensive. Text production is functionally free at this point, and image production (of course for submission to video production requests) costs cents on the dollar. Working on a platform like Artlist is actually a way to build an immutable series.
It might be sadder than that. The team behind The Arc went out of their way to emphasize that everyone who worked on the project was paid a full day, just as they would be on a set. Great, but fewer people working faster, with fewer monetary resources, will lead to the de-skilling of the hobby and making it the sole province of the rich indie/their nephews, not a proliferation of new storytellers of all stripes. "Ark" proves that a team might pay less to do it. That's probably the worst thing about it.