I made a pitch video for my science fiction action-adventure INFINITY CANVAS (which I’ve adapted as a graphic novel manuscript and feature-length screenplay. It’s pretty cool. Watch it.

And now on to a lengthy philosophical debate about artificial intelligence and creatives. Fitting, since the antagonist in INFINITY CANVAS is quite literally about people trying to survive an AI-powered techno-dystopia.

I made my pitch video with three AI tools:

• Video: Luma AI. I uploaded images from my artist partner’s sample pages for the INFINITY CANVAS graphic novel and added simple text prompts to guide the generative video.
• Music: Soundraw. I chose a few filters to get a track with the right vibe, then did some push-button editing to customize.
• Video editing: Canva. This is a more conventional digital editing platform, but I used some of its embedded AI tools to edit the video and sound.

So, in a world of OpenAI’s SORA and Luma, we’ve all seen better AI-created content than my pitch video. If you look closely, you’ll see weird glitchy stuff in my video where the AI went sideways.

But it’s wild that I — a guy who is 100% a writer and not at all a visual artist — could create this for FREE (Luma, Soundraw and Canva have paid tiers, but I didn’t need them) in like three hours of actual work.

And therein lies the inseparable promise and catastrophe of AI for creatives. I am a “startup” creator, trying to make my name as a writer. Everything I do is on my own time and/or budget, and the opportunity cost is not doing paid freelance work.

So of course AI tools that could help my work stand out to producers, studios, literary manager and literary agent types, etc., are attractive to me.

But for the same reasons (time and money), AI is attractive to studios and producers. Which means fewer jobs for creatives like me. People argue about this. But it’s just true. If AI can generate the video and the music and also do an OK job writing and editing, the creatives are fucked. Even though it’s our historical work the AI is using.

So, to sum it up, I’m sure a lot of creatives (even very successful ones) are feeling like motes of dust being blown around by forces much greater than them. Do you fight the wind or just let it take you? Or, to use a different metaphor, choose the Daniel Day-Lewis route in THERE WILL BE BLOOD: I put my straw in your AI milkshake and drink it up before the opportunity is gone.