AI is collapsing the cost of great content

For most of the last century, cinematic content had a gatekeeper: budget. To make something that looked truly professional you needed a crew, gear, a render farm, and weeks of post-production. That single fact decided whose ideas got made and whose didn’t. AI is quietly dissolving it — and that changes who gets to create.

This is the bet behind Magic, the AI platform I co-founded: take the hard, expensive parts of production — 3D, CGI, VFX — and put them behind one button, so anyone can turn an idea into studio-quality video in seconds. When the cost of producing great content approaches zero, the constraint stops being money and starts being imagination.

What actually changes

• Speed. Ideas that used to take weeks take seconds. You iterate at the pace of the feed, not the pace of a production calendar.
• Access. A solo creator can now ship work that used to require an agency. The playing field between “big budget” and “good idea” levels out.
• Volume. Agencies and brands can produce more variations, for more channels and audiences, without linearly more cost.

When production cost collapses, the bottleneck moves from “can we afford to make it?” to “is it worth making?” That’s a much better question.

The trap to avoid

Cheap content is not the same as good content. When everyone can generate infinite video, the scarce thing isn’t production — it’s taste, story, and a point of view. The brands and creators who win this era won’t be the ones who generate the most; they’ll be the ones who know what’s worth generating and why. AI removes the cost of execution. It does not remove the need for judgement.

Why this matters beyond marketing

Collapsing content cost is also what makes spatial and immersive experiences viable. For years, AR and metaverse projects were one-off mega-budget stunts precisely because the content was so expensive to make. Cheap, fast, high-quality generation turns immersive content from a rare event into an everyday capability — which is exactly what brands need if these experiences are going to be more than a single campaign (more on that in the metaverse for brands).

The deeper principle I keep coming back to: powerful creative tools shouldn’t belong only to teams with big budgets. When they’re in everyone’s hands, the next wave of great work comes from people who never could have afforded a studio. That’s the part of this I find genuinely exciting.