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 that they didn't stop to think about whether they should.

There’s a thing that always happens — you should take a drink, except no, you shouldn’t — when the folks who work on short-form Generative AI series speak about their work, as the team behind AI platform Artlist’s sci-fi miniseries “The Arc” did to Business Insider. 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 “cure” 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.

Cue the “Ratatouille” quote. “Anyone can cook.”

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’s 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’s possible using the platform’s access to video-generation models like Veo, Seedance, and Kling.

Now, generative tools 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. 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 “The Arc” team about how they would do “a 10-minute verbal brain dump” 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.

It’s reflected in the visuals of the series, which are as unimaginative as the AI actor renders are dead and inexpressive even before they’re 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).

It sure seems like “The Arc’s” 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 “Squid Game” inside of several different AAA PlayStation titles. No one gave them the money to do something like this through traditional filmmaking because they weren’t 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 — as expressed through AI videos anyway — they had nothing interesting to say.

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. “The Arc” team was given $38,000 in AI credits to create the series — less money, it must be said, than Audible tends to spend on original audio series, let alone the budgets of television shows — 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 “The Arc” is the business proposition of hosting a series like it.

So, can they?

The answer is, honestly, “kinda.” 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’s possible to generate 83 minutes of video within the budget of “The Arc.” 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 — although linking individual shots together might prove maddening without some custom plugins.

It’s only the video that’s expensive, too. Text generation is functionally free at this point, and the cost of image generation (to then be fed into video generation 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.

It may be even more tragic that that’s the case. The team behind “The Arc” went out of their way to stress that everyone who worked on the project was paid a full day rate, as they would’ve 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. “The Arc” proves it’s possible for a team paid less than that to do it. That may be the most dystopian thing about it.