The economics of content creation have changed faster than most teams realize.
Many years ago a commercial ad would require the involvement of many people to get it right; a music composer or arranger, a graphic designer to create the illustrations, and animator to create the motion graphics, the video editor to cut the ad, and a voice over or on camera actor. Although we all expect high class advertising, nowadays we all want it in a faster way. In our days as creators we have the challenge of dealing with many requests from various brands, start-ups and entrepreneurs that need to get their content out for all the different platforms they need, ranging from video ads and social media, to landing page videos, ads, onboarding videos and educational videos.
The lack of labor is resulting in a bottleneck in production. There is no longer a shortage of creative talent, but of the ability to produce.
A new generation of applications based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) are beginning to make a real difference. While many have pointed out the capability of applications such as Amper to compose a song, or plugins such as Prism or Avid’s Euphoric to bring an image to life and lipsync a face, what’s often missed is the fact that the real value of these tools is starting to be more than just creating something artistic, but rather integrating the capabilities into a workflow that brings the power of the AI into the actual production of media. Instead of being yet another tool for the particular creative task, the new generation of AI-based applications are instead providing a production layer for media.
So now, with the help of AI, single person or small teams can become a full-stack media production studio.
From Single Assets to Connected Workflows
The first wave of creative AI apps were all about solving particular problems. There was an app that would do copywriting, an app that would do graphic design, and so on. You could use an app to change the background of an image, or an app to create a voice over, and so on. And while each app was fantastic at what it did, the amount of work required to get the apps to work together to achieve your goals was typically off the charts.
What is changing now is convergence.
Text can become music. A still image can become motion. Audio can drive a speaking face. These effects happen fast enough to try them out, refine them and be ready to use the result of your work in a single session. Whether you work all day or only a few hours, Samson Creative Media apps are designed to inspire and expand your creative horizons.
This is a new challenge because the value of media has changed. Media is no longer defined by quality of the output. Media is now defined by time, flexibility and quantity. In order to reach all target audiences, channels and languages, we must now create a high number of variations of each piece of media. This is not a production workflow that was ever intended.
AI-native workflows are.
The New AI Creator Stack Has Three Powerful Layers
So, now that we have all those building blocks in place, we can break down the process of creating the new AI media stack into three levels: music generation, image animation, and speech-driven video.
1. From Words to Music
Music is generally one of the hardest content layers for small teams to create in a meaningful way. Writing an original song, making a piece of branded music, or even a relevant soundtrack for something is usually a question of money or expertise (or both).
That barrier is dropping.
I’ve also shown how one can train a model that turns lyrics into a song and then generates audio with the vocals, accompaniment, style and other generation hyperparameters. This tool is a lyrics-to-song tool which creates complete songs in a wide variety of musical styles and also lets you customize the style of the music, select or deselect sections of the accompaniment, enter Pro mode and purchase a subscription to legally use music for commercial use. LyricstoSongs is a perfect tool for songwriters wanting to compose songs that are of the highest professional standards, marketers who need memorable tunes for their ad campaigns, or content creators wanting to quickly generate tunes for the background of their videos or demos.
A significant business impact. With Soundraw, a startup can experiment with a branded audio identity for a product without having to engage a full music team. A content creator can generate a unique soundtrack for a short video in a matter of minutes without having to engage with the fragmentation and uncertainty of the music licensing marketplaces. A marketer can rapidly turn an idea for a campaign into a working audio asset in minutes, maintaining a cadence of content production.
This doesn’t make you or me obsolete as musicians/producers. The timing and the nature of when and how we are needed will change. A.I. is about doing the work of speed and iteration while we do the work of taste, identity and emotion.
2. From Static Images to Motion
The next layer is visual motion.
Most businesses and creators have a library of static media consisting of hundreds or thousands of individual assets like product images, character designs, marketing graphics, old photos, and more. Currently the only way to use this media as part of a video is to have it professionally animated by a creative, motion graphics artist or to go through a very involved video editing workflow.
Image animation AI changes that equation.
Animate Image AI is an image-first animation system that turns still images into animations in seconds, whilst providing full depth analysis, subject intent understanding, light analysis, as well as contextual logic to dynamically render animations that are depth-aware, context-aware and micro-motions integrated with prompt-guided motion design that supports fast preview and iteration. Suitable for marketing, social media, education and storytelling.
Animated Assets are now a staple in the arsenal of any modern marketer. Performance marketing and visual storytelling are two areas where this is especially true. While sometimes it is worth taking the time to do a full video production for a campaign, in many cases all you need is an animated version of an existing asset. A hero image with some animation, a product image with some cinematic motion or a social post that is animated enough to grab the viewers attention before they are scrolled away.
The technology is very efficient. Currently, in the field of graphics, movie production companies spend a huge amount of time and money on creating the scenes of the movie and later on rendering it in the actual movie. With this technology, they can make better use of the assets they already have. Artists and animators can add more depth and emotion to their work without having to spend countless hours creating the backgrounds and environments that are needed for their work.
3. From Audio to Speaking Video
The third layer is perhaps the most commercially versatile: lip-synced talking video.
We’ve determined that speaking-face content is a popular choice because it’s quick, personal and seemingly easy to grasp. In fact, we find speaking-face content in explainers, onboarding, tutorials, product launches, learning content, regional content and creator-led stories. A longtime pain point in producing talking-head video at scale has been the necessity of involving cameras, re-takes, post-production editing, voice over syncing and working with on-screen talent.
Not sure about the business model for Lip Sync Pro. From the Lip Sync Pro website, an application described as a space for creators using AI technology to lip sync images, audio, source videos and even do dual audio lip sync with audio uploaded by the user. The website also lists the use cases for the application as communication for creators, education communication and brand communication and describes it as a quick way to turn a portrait photo or an existing video into talking videos.
What a fantastic opportunity for startups and marketers everywhere! What was historically a very cumbersome and very expensive process to transform a single ad campaign into a Spokesperson Video can now be done in minutes. This is now a great way to transform any educational content that needs a better explanation and to change any explainer video into something much more impactful. With remote teams and international offices becoming a standard in the startup and marketing world, the ability to quickly test and iterate different messaging for different languages, regions and even for Voice Over work without having to re-create the original ad, is now finally here.
This is more than a trivial change in the ease of creating video encodings. The media pipeline is becoming more modular.
Why This Matters for Startups and Lean Teams
When we think about the creator economy, we generally think of social media influencers. I think there’s actually a bigger shift happening for all sorts of smaller players: small businesses, startups, teachers, agencies, and solo-preneurs.
Content teams are under pressure to deliver a high volume of content on a similar frequency to more traditional media channels, often with the added challenge of having a smaller team to manage this workload. Can AI help fill this content gap?
Cheap prototypes allow for lower production costs. You can play around with a lot of different ideas in a low cost environment before going to the more expensive and resource consuming solutions.
Another huge benefit of working solo is that you are able to work at a much faster pace. When working in a collaborative environment, often times your work would have to be handed off to someone else in order to get some type of feedback on it. In a solo environment, you can just keep moving on and make the next version instead of having to stand still and wait for someone to get
Thirdly, the system is versioning. The same campaign message can be transformed into songs, animated videos, or speech-based videos to be distributed across various platforms.
Fourth, it allows for greater access to professional level work flow. Anybody can be a bit of a musician, animator or editor but few people are truly professional in their field.
This is particularly relevant in the world of growth marketing, where the speed of testing far outweighs the first attempt. Creating a single asset over the course of days, weeks or months won’t be enough to guarantee success. The winning team will be the one that can create 10 variations and test them, understanding which asset will yield the best results.
One Campaign, Built in an AI-Native Workflow
Before we start with the description, let us try to form a first impression of how the stack could be used in practice. In a product launch campaign, for example, there are two groups of people involved. On the one side there are the future customers
Every founder wants to get their message out about their product. We call this message a value proposition. Its the mission statement, condensed to a single sentence. We can turn this message into a song, top line or ad copy, and then use LyricsToSong to turn that into an original song.
So we take an existing hero image, product illustration or character visual and apply an image animation workflow to it. Animate Image AI describes this workflow as a technique for creating depth-aware motion from static images for marketing and storytelling applications.
Add narrative or explain with a spokesperson using lip sync workflow. Lip Sync Pro can drive a face image or source video with audio you upload to turn a static image into a talking video.
What used to require deploying solutions from multiple vendors and categories of systems is now becoming a single, connected process.
idea to audio,
image to motion,
audio to speaking video.
And it’s not about being convenient. It changes the nature of the types of teams that are able to participate in a marketplace.
What AI Still Cannot Replace
It is important not to overstate what these tools do.
Artificial intelligence may be able to speed up the production of content but it does not guarantee that the content will be high quality. Artificial intelligence does not determine the taste of your brand. Artificial intelligence does not guarantee that your content will resonate with your target audience. Artificial intelligence does not inherently know that human intervention will be necessary to determine which version of content will resonate with your target audience.
In practice, the applications of this technology that are likely to prove most useful are those in which the AI does the work of actually generating the content and the human does the relatively light work of deciding which content to use.
This one matters. What’s at play here is the distinction between generating more content and actually communicating more effectively. The world is at risk of one thing, and one thing only: that we are faced with the unprecedented circumstance of having more content available to us than ever before in history, and that that content has been produced with no regard to whether it has anything valuable or meaningful to say. The world is not at risk because creators have it easy, because the work is trivial, unchallenging, unimportant or otherwise insufficiently onerous. It’s simply a matter of the sheer quantity of content being generated and the fact that no one has considered whether anything that is being produced actually has anything at all to say.
The real opportunity is elsewhere. An opportunity to use technology in such a way as to maximise our creative leverage whilst still maintaining the rights to our work.
The Competitive Advantage Is No Longer Just Budget
Media quality has been driven by team size and budget for a very long time. Large media organisations can afford to hire experts, work on in depth, long term investigations and spend weeks if not months gathering together the right information.
That advantage is weakening.
With the right tools and workflow, a solo artist can now create music, animations and live action videos at a rate that would have been unimaginable in a production studio. The work will not be anywhere near the quality of a blockbuster movie, but the minimum bar for what is considered to be professional quality content is dropping rapidly.
And when accessibility combines with speed, new kinds of businesses emerge.
Small teams can launch faster. Agencies can serve more clients without linear headcount growth. Educators can package knowledge more effectively. Founders can communicate ideas more clearly. Creators can experiment with formats that were once out of reach.
This is an unusual time in the history of content creation, and I think it’s important to keep in mind the role of AI in all of this. In the past, using AI in content creation was generally relegated to proof of concept exercises that, while technically impressive, rarely had a place in real-world content workflows. Those days are largely behind us, as content creation with AI is increasingly becoming the new normal.
The Future Belongs to AI-Native Media Builders
The future of media won’t be about who has the best apps or who makes the best video editing software. The future of media will be about workflow.
We’re starting to see that music composition, animation, lip syncing and other effects that we used to think of as isolation tools are now beginning to link together to form a new Content Creation Platform. The winners of this new technology shift will be content creators and companies that design their workflows and productions with AI as a fundamental component of their production architecture.
That architecture favors speed, experimentation, and modular creativity.
And this is what the world looks like when every solo artist, every startup and every lean team is freed from the traditional production constraints. Every one of them can be full-stack media studios.
