Artificial Intelligence Is Coming to Television Whether We Like It or Not.
YouTube may have been the official partner of MIPCOM this year , but the unofficial winner was artificial intelligence. This year, I attended MIPCOM in Cannes, France, for the first time, and as someone who doesn’t use generative AI in my daily life, let alone writing or storytelling, I received a clear message: join in, or you’ll be left behind. AI is coming to television, whether I like it or not.
MIPCOM, the long-standing annual global trade show for television and digital media, celebrated its 40th anniversary last week in partnership with YouTube, strengthening the bridge between the creator economy and traditional TV shows. Many influencers have already migrated to our living room TVs—MrBeast, Lilly Singh, and others have used YouTube’s fame as a springboard for more mainstream TV shows—and it’s clear the industry sees them as avenues for acquiring YouTube talent with a built-in audience. But AI feels different. While the gates are opening for content creators to reach a wider audience, AI can play a different numbers game: like a podcast company producing 3,000 episodes of AI-generated content per week , most episodes can fail, and it can still be a worthwhile return on investment.
One panel I attended, titled “Infinite Creativity: Storytelling in the Age of Imagination,” articulated this idea: even if 99.99% of AI-generated videos are low-quality nonsense, the remaining 0.01% still constitutes more hours of content than Hollywood can produce in a year. Other panels echoed this sentiment, suggesting session titles such as “Content Monetization in the Age of AI,” “Next in AI: Showcasing Creative Innovation,” and “Growing Future Creative Leaders with AI.”
LoglineAI, a company that bills itself as an “AI-powered creative studio,” invited me via email to “explore the future of storytelling.” Their value proposition is to use AI to “ensure consistent characterization, multilingual dubbing with adaptive lip sync, and emotion-aware visual storytelling, enabling faster, smarter, and more scalable content.” I would have dismissed this as nonsense if I hadn’t attended so many sessions dedicated to the success of AI-generated content. Like me, you might not know that ” slopcore ” can be so popular.
Vertical video—anything designed for viewing on a smartphone, like TikTok or Reels—is the genre where AI-generated content has achieved its greatest success, and vertical microdramas are already gaining popularity in international markets. These short series typically last one to two minutes, and the fast-paced drama is often meant to be over-the-top and easy to consume. For example, I saw a screening of the Turkish series “Legacy of Blood”—an AI-generated microdrama in the style of “300 ” about an obscenely muscular Spartan training his son to become a warrior. Another example, ” Nine-Tailed Fox, Demon, Falls for Me, ” straddles the pre-mainstream gray area where it’s simultaneously unknown and incredibly popular: I’ve never heard of it, and I bet you haven’t either, yet it’s racked up over 200 million views. The plot is incomprehensible, but its nonsensicality is part of the appeal. In other countries, such as Colombia, microdramas have become the most popular form of television, overtaking both traditional television and streaming services.
It remains to be seen whether AI-generated content will retain its niche in vertical video or penetrate traditional television. You may remember Quibi as an example of microdramas failing to gain traction, but statistics show that abandoning vertical video would be a mistake. The trajectory of microdramas in the Chinese market has challenged many of my own assumptions: vertical dramas generate $5 billion in annual revenue, initially targeting middle-aged and older audiences, and have subsequently gained popularity, approaching the box office revenue of standard content.
So should we expect an AI-generated Spartan falling in love with a nine-tailed fox to appear on the fall TV schedule? How long until we see AI-generated garbage on our HBO or Netflix homepages? While microdramas and AI-generated content will increasingly appear on our phones, I expect a more indirect approach from television. The television industry relies on content creators to tell stories, and many of them are increasingly relying on AI.
As TV networks continue to rely on online creators to generate new programming, more and more content creators are embracing AI tools to address the audience fluctuations needed for stability and competitiveness. “Storytelling in the Age of Imagination” means AI platforms can create videos from virtually anything, and even if 99.99% of those videos are incomprehensible nonsense that fails, networks can rely on the remaining 0.01% to capture the attention of the general public, much like Hollywood once hoped to capitalize on emojis or Angry Birds .
The difference is that AI-powered storytelling may not be so obvious. The future of television won’t be mindless AI-generated nonsense, but it may be AI-inspired and certainly AI-powered. I wouldn’t be surprised if I one day saw a trailer for something as silly as the story of a nine-tailed fox falling in love, and you shouldn’t be either. Perhaps the best we can do is learn to recognize AI-written stories. Or learn to ignore them.