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Two recent events, seemingly unrelated, seem to have captured the shift that AI is bringing to media production. First, a music composer with no filmmaking experience, Jacob Adler, won the $15,000 Grand Prix at the Runway AI Film Festival for his visually poetic nine-minute film, Total Pixel Space. Weeks later, a chaotic, 30-second commercial for the financial company Kalshi, created by one person in two days for about $2,000, aired during the NBA Finals.
One represents artistic empowerment, the other, ruthless production efficiency. Together, they prove that the production tools used to create high-impact content are no longer limited to trained specialists from the newsroom or marketing departments. AI is now empowering a wave of creative potential accessible to every employee at a media organization, from the CEO down to the interns.
The Artist: Creating A Masterpiece Without A Camera Image via Jacob Adler / YouTube
Adler’s victory is a story of pure creative vision. He crafted his award-winning film not with a camera, but with ideas. Using the text-to-image generator Midjourney, Runway AI’s video animations and a synthetic voice from ElevenLabs, he produced a piece that beat 6,000 other festival entries.
His background as a musician was all the experience he needed. “The process of composing music and editing film,” Adler told Forbes, “are both about orchestrating change through time.” His success proves the new barrier to entry isn’t technical skill, but the quality of the idea itself. As Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela revealed, “Artists