AI AgentWhat if a machine could write a full movie script? What if that same machine could also make the music and create every visual in the film?
This is not a dream. It is happening right now. Real studios and real production houses around the world are using AI to do all of these things today.
Generative AI in media and entertainment is changing how content gets made. It is changing how content gets shared. And it is changing how people watch, listen, and play, on their phones, at home, and in cinemas.
The market was worth $1.97 billion in 2024. By 2034, it is expected to reach $20.7 billion. That is not a small jump. That is a complete transformation of an entire industry.
And here is the most important part. This is not just for big companies with massive budgets. Independent creators, solo filmmakers, and small game studios are all using these tools right now. The barrier to entry has never been lower.
This guide walks you through 10 practical ways generative AI is being used in media and entertainment today. Real examples. Real numbers. No fluff. Let’s get into it!
What Is Generative Media?
Before we get into the use cases, let us get the definition right.
Generative media, a key part of generative AI in entertainment, refers to any content that is created or assisted by AI. This includes text, images, audio, video, and animation. The AI studies vast amounts of existing content and, based on user input, generates something entirely new.
It does not just copy old things. It builds original output every single time. It writes. It draws. It speaks. It composes music.
In entertainment, this covers a wide range of work. AI written scripts. AI generated voices. Virtual influencers that look like real people. Personalised playlists built in seconds. Game worlds that change based on what the player does.
Between 2022 and 2024, the number of organisations using generative AI jumped from 33% to 71%. That tells you everything. This went from being an experiment to being standard practice in just two years.
1. AI Content Personalisation
Streaming platforms live and die based on engagement. If the right content does not show up at the right moment, users scroll away. Sometimes they cancel their subscription entirely.
Generative AI in entertainment helps platforms show each person exactly what they want to see or hear next, at a scale no human team could ever match.
Netflix uses AI to study what you watch, when you watch it, and how long you stay. It uses all of that data to personalise not just recommendations but also the thumbnail image shown for each title. The same show will display a completely different thumbnail to different users depending on what kind of images they have clicked on in the past.
Netflix’s AI recommendation system drives around 80% of all content streamed on the platform.
Spotify takes the same approach with its AI playlist builder. You type a simple prompt like “music to fall asleep to” and get a full playlist built in seconds. This keeps users on the platform longer. It reduces churn. And it makes the product feel like it actually understands you.
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2. AI Scriptwriting and Story Development
Writing a script is one of the most time intensive parts of any production. It is also one of the hardest things to speed up without losing quality.
AI tools like Claude, GPT-4, and writing focused platforms like Sudowrite are helping writers move faster. They generate outlines, draft dialogue, fill in plot gaps, and produce multiple story versions from a single idea.
Studios now use these tools in early development to quickly test concepts before committing any budget. A writer can ask the AI to generate three different opening scenes for a thriller. Three solid drafts come back in under a minute. The writer picks the most promising one and develops it from there.
The human writer still does the real creative work. They edit, refine, and bring their voice to the material. But the blank page problem largely disappears.
The global AI content creation market was valued at $14.8 billion in 2024. It is projected to reach $80 billion by 2030, growing at 32.5% every year.
Content teams at every level are betting on this technology. Because it works.
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3. AI Dubbing and Language Localisation
One of the biggest barriers to global distribution has always been dubbing. Traditional studio dubbing costs between $5,000 and $15,000 per hour of content per language. It takes weeks to produce. And the results often feel flat and disconnected from the original performance.
Generative AI solves all three of those problems at once.
Tools like Papercup, Deepdub, and ElevenLabs use voice cloning and speech synthesis to dub content in multiple languages while keeping the original tone, pacing, and emotion of the actor. They also sync the new audio to the lip movements on screen.
Netflix used AI to automate 5 million minutes of dubbing and subtitling across its global library. That initiative saved an estimated $200 million and increased non-English viewership by 33%.
For independent creators, the impact is just as significant. A YouTube creator can now reach audiences in Japanese, Hindi, and Arabic without hiring a single voice actor.
AI dubbing delivers cost savings of 60 to 86% compared to traditional workflows. Production speed improves by 4 to 10 times. Creators using AI dubbing tools have reported watch time increases of 25% or more from international audiences.
Building a multilingual content engine requires more than just voice cloning. Ment Tech’s NLP & Text Analytics services help media companies process, translate, and analyse language at scale, faster and smarter.
Learn how enterprise-grade chatbots are built to actually know your business: How to Build an AI Chatbot with RAG Integration for Enterprise Applications
4. Generative AI in Video Game Development
Gaming is the single largest area where generative AI is being used in media and entertainment today. The reason is simple. Games need enormous volumes of content. Characters, environments, dialogue trees, music, textures, and storylines all need to be built from scratch. Doing all of that manually is one of the most resource intensive processes in all of entertainment.
AI changes the economics completely.
Gaming made up around 30% of the generative AI in the media and entertainment market in 2024, worth roughly $588 million.
Tools like Leonardo AI and Scenario AI help developers generate textures, character designs, and full game environments from simple text prompts in minutes. AI powered characters can now hold real conversations with players, adapting what they say based on what has happened in the game so far. This creates branching stories with near infinite variation.
By mid 2025, around 20% of new games on Steam disclosed that they used AI during development. That was double the figure from the year before.
The number is only going in one direction. Building AI into your game studio? Ment Tech’s Custom AI Development team can build exactly what you need.
5. AI Music and Sound Design
Creating original music for a film, game, or brand used to mean hiring composers, booking session musicians, and paying for expensive studio time. Generative AI removes most of those costs and compresses the timeline from weeks down to a few hours.
Platforms like Suno, Udio, and Soundraw let producers generate full tracks from a text description. You describe the mood, the tempo, and the instruments you want. The AI builds a complete track ready to use.
A game studio can generate 50 unique ambient music tracks in a single afternoon. A video creator can score an entire short film without worrying about music licensing fees.
Music labels are also using AI to create stems for remixes, experiment with new sonic styles, and quickly test how a track feels with different audience groups.
This is one of the fastest growing areas in generative AI for entertainment. The output is immediately usable and the tools are simple enough for anyone to pick up and start using the same day.
6. Visual Effects and AI Image Generation
Visual effects used to be one of the most expensive line items in any production budget. Generative AI is changing both the cost and the timeline for creating cinematic visuals. Tools like Runway ML, Adobe Firefly, and Stability AI allow VFX teams to generate photorealistic environments, digitally alter how actors look, remove unwanted objects from frames, and build sequences that would previously have taken months of careful manual work.
The image generation segment led the generative AI in the media and entertainment market with a 24.7% share in 2026. This was driven by demand for personalised visuals in advertising, film, and social media content. On the post production side, Netflix reports that AI assisted editing has reduced certain editing workflows from 12 weeks down to 8 weeks. That is a 30% time saving with a 25% reduction in cost per project.
7. AI Characters and Virtual Influencers
Some characters now exist only inside a computer. They are fully created by AI. Brands use them in advertising campaigns. Studios use them in film and television. And they are becoming harder and harder to tell apart from real people.
Lil Miquela is one of the most well known examples. She is a fully virtual influencer who worked with major fashion and technology brands and built millions of social media followers. Most of her audience did not know she was not a real person.
In film and television, AI allows studios to recreate historical figures convincingly. It lets them adjust how old or young an actor looks on screen. It lets them extend a character’s story beyond what a real actor can physically do. This opens creative doors that simply did not exist before. Long running franchises can continue storylines in ways that were impossible just a few years ago.
8. AI in Advertising and Marketing
Advertising teams use AI to create many versions of one ad very quickly. They can test different images, different words, different calls to action, and different visual styles across different audience groups. All of this happens without spinning up a full production for each version.
Advertising and marketing content generation led all applications of generative AI in media in 2025 with a 21.1% share. Netflix uses AI to personalise the trailers and thumbnails shown to different users. This approach saves an estimated $100 million in advertising spend every year and improves engagement by 20%. AI currently influences around 69% of global advertising revenue. That figure is projected to reach 94% by 2029. This is not something that is coming. It is already here.
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9. VR and AR Content Creation
Virtual reality and augmented reality experiences need huge amounts of spatial content. Full 3D environments, interactive objects, ambient sound design, and dynamic scenarios all need to be built from nothing. Doing that by hand is prohibitively expensive for most creators. Generative AI is making it possible for smaller teams to build immersive experiences that used to require much larger studios.
AI tools can now generate 3D models, spatial audio environments, and interactive scene elements just from a text description. A small team of five people can now build a VR experience that would previously have needed a team of fifty. The video generation segment within generative AI in media is expected to see the fastest growth going forward, with VR and AR content serving as a major driver of that expansion. Weekly use of generative AI tools has nearly doubled since 2024.
Understand how AI is reshaping operations at every level of a modern organisation: How AI Platforms Transform Modern Business Operations
10. AI in News and Journalism
News organisations use AI to write routine stories automatically. Earnings summaries, sports results, weather updates, and traffic reports can all be written by AI in seconds. This frees up journalists to focus on investigations, analysis, and storytelling that actually needs a human mind behind it.
AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg have all used AI to generate thousands of routine news articles automatically. Beyond text, AI tools help newsrooms produce content in multiple languages simultaneously. They generate graphics and data visualisations. They turn raw data into clear readable reports in minutes. For digital publishers, this means publishing at a pace and a scale that would be completely impossible with a human only team. And the editorial quality remains high where it matters most because the humans stay focused on the work that requires real judgement.
The Future of Entertainment Is AI-Driven
The studios, creators, and platforms that start using AI now will define what the next decade of media looks and sounds like. The tools are here. The results are proven. The only real question is how fast you are willing to move.
