AI Micro Dramas, Generative Media, and the Future of Creativity

**Justine Moore** (0:00)
I think folks would be surprised by how many TV shows and movies today already have some element of AI being used. I spend a lot of time with studio execs, and Amazon and Netflix have already both announced programs for fully AI generated animations. It's 90, 95 percent of the quality of filming, but it's so much cheaper and faster and easier. And I think the mass market consumer does not care that it was made with AI. But many of the people who were early adopters of AI video were not inherently amazing storytellers. And so they were making things that were novel, but were not necessarily the most compelling narratives. That is the major challenge. Now what we're starting to see is professional creatives who have worked in the space, seen the opportunity in this. And so we have people who know how to tell a narrative, which means we're going to get an explosion of really gripping stories. It sort of just unlocks all of this crazy weird interesting ideas that people have in their imagination that they could never make before. You see a lot of folks who have either started kind of full new AI native studios or who are just individuals running a brand and scaling their own content, creating narrative stories, turning around things in hours or days. And so most people don't want to be competing on more of the like low brow, soft content, but I think in terms of what creators should do, it really depends on like...

**SPEAKER_2** (1:24)
AI isn't just changing how content is made, it's changing who gets to make it. In this feed drop from New Economies, A16z's Justine Moore joins the show to discuss the rise of AI native entertainment, why AI micro dramas are exploding in popularity, and how generative media is lowering the barriers to storytelling for creators around the world.
They also explore AI agents, consumer startups, and the next wave of opportunities at the intersection of AI and media.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:55)
Justine, welcome to New Economies. We've been in touch kind of over the years on DMs, but this is the first time we're meeting. And wow, so much is happening across AI, new media, and now the latest trend, AI micro dramas. So we have so much to unpack, but a big welcome to the show.

**Justine Moore** (2:15)
Thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to chat about all those things.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:19)
So I feel like we're at this incredible inflection point around generative media, and so much has just been happening, really, in the last six months. We've had this explosion, new term, new media, which is kind of just replacing the creator economy. We've had, obviously, so much change in AI, and like we said at the beginning, this new incredible form of entertainment, AI microdramas.
Help us unpack what is the current state of everything happening in generative media. What's your heart take?

**Justine Moore** (2:55)
Yeah, I would say I've been following the generative media space for a couple years, actually. Really got into it a couple months before ChatGPT came out, when the first stable diffusion models came out, and you had folks like levels.io building really cool products on top of them, like the original AI profile picture generators. And it's really been remarkable to see the progress we've made since then. We went from not very good images to not very good two-second videos, now to full coherent 15-second videos that people can generate, let alone all the advancements that have happened in image and voice and 3D.
I think we're at a really interesting point where the model quality has gotten good enough that you can actually make things that are compelling to watch and that carry a storyline, versus things that are just like interesting for the novelty value of like, whoa, AI can make something that almost looks real. And so as a result, we've had a ton of progress happening both on the model layer, obviously, and those improvements will continue to happen, but also on the product layer. Like, when the models are finally good enough for people to use, you kind of have to create the right harnesses and workflows for people to actually leverage them, especially people who aren't full time prompting all of these models. And so they don't know what model to pick for which use case, how to write a really good prompt, things like that. So to me, it feels like where we are in generative media right now is really the entire ecosystem maturing, both consumers, but also professional studios waking up to the fact that these are models are finally good enough to use. And the product builders realizing that there's a lot of opportunity to create like the interfaces through which we use them.