What Happens When Anyone Can Become an AI Studio?

Earlier this week, there was a strange news segment in the US. Reports claimed that monkeys were running loose in St Louis. On its own, this would have been nothing more than a quirky human-interest story. The situation became more serious when videos circulating online could not be verified as either real footage or AI-generated. That led to false sightings, wasted time and resources for authorities, and general confusion about whether the monkeys even existed

Now imagine if this had been something more sensitive. Something designed to provoke anger or fear when nothing had actually happened. Given how agitated public discourse already is, that risk is very real.

This episode highlights how easily AI technology can be manipulated. What looks like harmless fun to some can quickly become a crisis for others. And as always, malicious actors are the first to exploit weak points.

I have long believed that when AI companies made their models free, or close to it, they didn’t just open a new market. They reduced the cost of entry to almost zero. The cost of exit is just as low. You simply stop prompting. Anyone with a PC and roughly Rs 30,000 a year can now run what is effectively an AI studio. Suppliers exploded overnight, all with minimal overheads. Thousands of them, each willing to charge slightly less than the next.

This collapse of the supplier moat has had consequences across society and industry.

AI slop is now everywhere. Content competes for a three-second attention span. Low attention spans combined with effortless mass generation means billions of low-quality outputs flooding the internet every minute. Genuine, useful content gets buried. It becomes a vicious cycle. Public sentiment can be inflamed in seconds because we haven’t yet learned how to live with this technology or understand its guardrails.

On the industry side, democratization and freemium AI tools created an army of ultra-low-cost suppliers. Ironically, the biggest winners were the buyers, not the suppliers. As humans tend to do, they pushed prices down by playing suppliers against each other. With low barriers to entry and endless competition, vendors entered a race to the bottom. Prices collapsed. Quality followed. But for content designed to grab attention for a few seconds, many brands were willing to accept that tradeoff as long as it wasn’t obviously bad. This low cost deluge also swamped the advertising and digital agencies. Suddenly they were out priced by a legion of younger companies that had little or no overheads or time constraints. Some shut shop, some hired the upstarts or started their own AI divisions. Its a state of flux all over the AI world!