Tech Startup Raises $24 Million to Replace Hollywood With AI Slop

In case you haven't noticed, generative AI is creeping into our lives at an alarming rate. The perfidious tech and its algorithmically-generated slop is becoming a fact of life as unscrupulous tech companies set it loose into the world, consequences be damned.

Unless you live in a hut, AI video slop is pretty much unavoidable. It's choking the internet with deranged brainrot, kids content, and even bizzaro Trump family engagement bait. The avalanche is so devastating that an international coalition of animator unions recently declared an industry-wide emergency over generative AI.

It's coming for the film production industry, as AI video startup Moments Lab makes clear. The company recently completed a Series B funding round, according to Business Insider, raising about $24 million to develop "AI tools" for film studios. On top of a previous funding round, the company's raised over $37 million to date.

Founded in France — the birthplace of film, as if the software itself wasn't disparaging enough — the company's "core tool," MXT-2, is marketed as something of an AI film librarian. Basically, it scrapes human-made footage and sorts it based on featured subject, actor, and location, according to the company's website.

That job typically falls to the data wrangler on a film set and the assistant editor in post-production, the type of junior-level roles which creative industry gurus say are most susceptible to automation or outright elimination.

With the latest funding round, Moments Lab is eyeing the creation of an "agentic AI tool," a type of software product that's marketed as an autonomous assistant. (AI agents remain notoriously buggy, and tremendously difficult to use at scale.)

If the company's lofty promises turn out — a monumental "if," given the difficulty AI companies have had developing agents — its new tool would take uncut footage and deliver early edits based on text prompts. In that case, video editors would essentially be relegated to AI cleanup duty.

While films using human artists will always exist, software like this has the potential to make major waves in the advertising, television, and broadcast spaces — whether it's technically ready for the job or not.

Even if production studios don't adopt tools offered by Moments Lab en masse, companies like it still have a very real possibility of degrading film labor by suppressing wages, sloppifying human-made content, and ratcheting up the demands on human workers.

Of course, at the heart of their company's pitch, Moments Lab's founders tell BI, isn't a love for the creative process or a desire to make better content, but an increase in revenue.

"It's a way to create new revenue streams," Philippe Petitpont, one of the startup's co-founders said. "Before now, it was very complicated for production companies to create a revenue stream because there was a huge need for humans — it's a very tedious task."

Petitpont likewise told BI that one media client expects to keep fewer editors on board as a result of the tech. "The big question is: Will the assistant start to be the senior editor, or will the job disappear?" the cofounder asked. "We don't know yet."

More on AI: In Further Assault on Cinema, Amazon Is Deploying AI-Aided Dubs on Streaming Movies

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