Rear-view mirror 2025 and reality check 2026. Let’s just say both film and music industries have wrapped up a year of a very uncomfortable but evolving companionship. The year started with loud screams of ‘oh no, AI will kill creativity and filmmaking as we know it’ and ended with The Walt Disney Company making a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI for video generator Sora, as well a three-year licensing agreement to bring more than 200 of its iconic characters to that video generation tool. The only question that’s worth asking is — was it all worth it? After twelve months of a whole lot of corporate double-speak, what do these industries actually have to show for cozying up to AI? Spoiler alert — it’s complicated.
The Hollywood side of things: All hype, little magic
Let’s start with the film world, which spent most of 2025 doing an awkward dance between embracing AI and pretending it wasn’t really using it. The fact is, no matter how much the actors resisted, the reality is Disney has invested a cool billion dollars in OpenAI and licensed Sora for video generation. Studios likely discussed AI projects in boardrooms, while publicly staying silent, terrified of antagonising the same actors and writers who’d just finished striking in 2023 over this exact issue. The most telling moment? Tilly Norwood.
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Remember her? The AI-generated “actress” who became 2025’s most controversial non-person. Created by producer Eline Van der Velden’s company Particle6, Tilly was unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival with the announcement that talent agencies were circling to represent her. The backlash was swift and brutal. SAG-AFTRA issued a statement emphasising creativity should remain human-centred, declaring that Tilly Norwood “is not an actor”. Actresses like Emily Blunt called it “terrifying”, while Whoopi Goldberg pointed out the unfair advantage of an AI composite trained on thousands of real performers’ work without permission or compensation. Van der Velden’s defence? Tilly was “art”, not a replacement for humans. She went through 2,000 iterations to achieve that “girl next door authenticity” designed to “provoke a reaction.” Mission accomplished, I suppose.
But here’s the thing. Tilly’s debut sketch, “AI Commissioner,” was universally panned. Critics described it as “relentlessly unfunny” with dialogue that was “sloppily written, woodenly delivered,” and movements so uncanny they gave reviewers “the screaming fantods.” After 700,000 YouTube views, what did Hollywood learn? That you can make a technically competent digital puppet, but you can’t automatically make it compelling viewing. Yet Tilly wasn’t Hollywood’s only AI controversy.
Two Oscar front-runners got caught in the crossfire. ‘The Brutalist’ used AI tool Respeecher to refine Hungarian accents of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, plus employed generative AI to create architectural drawings for the film’s finale. Emilia Pérez used a similar methodology to enhance star Karla Sofía Gascón’s singing range, blending her voice with French singer Camille’s. Both films tried to frame this as practical problem-solving using AI. I get it, Hungarian is really hard to pronounce, and also certain vocal registers were difficult to reach. But the optics were terrible. These revelations landed during awards season, prompting fierce debate about authenticity in performance. The Academy is now considering mandatory AI disclosure requirements for future Oscar submissions.
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Yet, it crystallised the central tension — if we’re using AI to “fix” what human actors can’t quite nail, are we still watching human performances? Takes me back to a question I’ve often asked AI executives over the past couple of years — at what point does AI generation stop getting classified as art? I’m yet to find a satisfactory answer.
Behind the scenes, the picture is murkier. Studios are absolutely experimenting with AI, they’ve just been too afraid to admit it publicly. Open secrets include the use of AI chatbots to rework scripts, to assist with marketing campaigns and more, all while worrying the same tools will eliminate their jobs. Disney’s billion-dollar bet on OpenAI shows where the money’s going, even if 2025 didn’t give us a single moment to show AI is better off with Hollywood, and vice-versa. Another case in point, Coca Cola’s holiday season ads that proudly were generated with AI, and yet it is believed to have needed 100 humans and 70,000 AI generated clips, to come to life.
Director Rian Johnson has called AI “making everything worse in every single way.” Filmmaker Bong Joon Ho was jokingly serious about organising a military squad to destroy the technology (is there any place others can sign up for this mission?). The creative community isn’t buying what Silicon Valley is selling.
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Music’s messier embrace
The music industry’s relationship with AI has been, if anything, even more chaotic. At least Hollywood could hide behind “enhancing” human performances and streamlining complex processes. Music is dealing with AI that can generate complete songs from text prompts in seconds, and listeners mostly can’t tell the difference.
A Deezer and Ipsos study in November dropped a bombshell — 97% of listeners failed to distinguish between completely AI-generated tracks from human-made music. Think about that. Ninety-seven percent. When told about these results, 71% of people were surprised, and 52% felt uncomfortable. The uncanny valley isn’t so uncanny anymore, and that’s precisely the problem.
Tools like Suno and Udio caught a fair wind of popularity in 2025, allowing anyone to type a few words and receive a complete song with vocals, instruments, and full arrangement. This democratisation was cheered on by evangelists (you’d expect nothing different). Musicians, for whom this is a profession underlined by blood, sweat and tears? Not so much. They watched as AI-generated projects such as Bleeding Verse racked up 916,000 Spotify listeners. Lucas Woodland, lead singer of rock band Holding Absence, called it the following — “shocking, disheartening, insulting,” and “a wake-up call.”
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Major labels tried having it both ways. After initially suing them for copyright infringement, Warner Music Group came around towards the end of the year and signed deals with both Suno and Udio, which allowed these platforms to continue operating while giving labels some licensing revenue. Spotify introduced AI disclosure standards, allowing artists to tag how they used AI in their creative process. Deezer went further, becoming the first streaming platform to explicitly tag fully AI-generated music and implement detection tools for platforms like Suno and Udio.
But here’s what the music industry can’t quite counter while riding the tiger — AI music is growing fast, and it’s eating into human artists’ work and revenue. Studies indicate that by 2028, nearly 25% of creators’ revenues are at risk, and that is potentially €4 billion. Another analysis predicts musicians could lose up to 27% of their revenue within three years if proper compensation systems aren’t established. Currently, fully AI-generated music represents only about 0.5% of Deezer’s streams, but the trajectory is clear.
The market tells the story the industry doesn’t want to hear. The AI music market was valued at $5.2 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $60.44 billion by 2034, growing at nearly 28% annually. Revenue from AI-generated music is expected to boost the industry by 17.2% in 2025 alone. That’s not innovation on the margins, but a fundamental restructuring instead.
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Most striking is how musicians are responding. They’re using AI tools in their projects, such as for mixing, mastering, generating beats, analysing frequencies, and creating backing tracks. The casual ‘producer’ sitting in the parents’ living room can now expect to achieve professional-quality sound without booking time at expensive studios or years of technical training. Whether that’s liberation or loss depends on who you ask.
The infiltration of generative AI into music-making marks a watershed moment for an industry still recovering from the pandemic and struggling to compensate artists fairly in the streaming era. In response, platforms like Humanable emerged, offering certification for human-made music. It’s a defensive crouch, an acknowledgment that the default assumption might soon flip. And that music will be presumed AI-generated unless proven otherwise.
What have they actually gained?
So after a year of courting AI, what do Hollywood and music have to show for it?
For Hollywood and film makers, claims of efficiency gains in post-production, some cost savings on visual effects, faster script analysis, and a whole lot of bad PR. No AI-generated film has captured the cultural imagination. No AI “actor” has delivered a performance anyone remembers. The technology remains more promise than an actual product.
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For music, a genuine disruption that doesn’t seem to have a counter. AI tools have legitimately democratised music production, putting professional-quality creation and mixing within reach of anyone with a laptop. Streaming platforms integrated AI recommendations that drive discovery. The tools work, people use them, and they’re changing how music gets made. And heard by millions worldwide. Don’t forget the existential dread. If AI can generate convincing songs in seconds, what happens to the human musicians who spent years developing their craft?
The real question nobody wants to answer
Here’s what neither industry wants to confront — that they’ve spent 2025 trying to have it both ways, but they aren’t winning. They want AI’s efficiency, cost savings, and creative shortcuts without acknowledging that these tools fundamentally threaten the human labor that makes their industries possible.
When Disney invests a billion in OpenAI while SAG-AFTRA fights to protect actors from AI replacement, that’s not a contradiction to be managed. When Warner Music Group signs licensing deals with the same AI platforms its artists fear will make them obsolete, that’s not pragmatic adaptation, it’s actively financing the disruption of their own talent pool. Corporations will simply look after their interests. Humans don’t often figure on that list. Good luck with that.
Vishal Mathur is the Technology Editor at HT. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live, and vice versa. The views expressed are personal.