I have spent nine years directing CGI, and for all nine of them the cost of a competent image has been falling. AI has just cut it again, harder than anything before it.
Every time the floor drops, the same worry goes around the industry: if anyone can produce the image, what is the work worth? And every time, the market gives the same answer. The image was never the product. The decision was.
What actually got cheaper
Be precise about what the tools changed, because the panic usually is not. Execution got cheaper: polish, resolution, speed, and above all volume. Two hundred variations now cost what two used to.
Here is what did not get cheaper. Knowing which of the two hundred is right. Knowing what the brief is actually asking for, underneath what it says. Knowing what to leave out. Knowing the image is wrong, and being able to say why in one sentence. Restraint, which has always been the most expensive ingredient in creative work, is exactly as scarce as it was ten years ago.
Correct is not compelling
The gap between correct and compelling is a creative direction problem, and it is the gap clients actually pay for. A correct image answers the brief. A compelling one answers the viewer: it makes a product feel inevitable, expensive, worth wanting.
Technology keeps making correct cheaper. It has not moved compelling at all, because compelling is not a property of the render. It is a property of the hundred decisions behind the render, and someone still has to make them.
Where taste comes from
Taste gets talked about as a gift. It is closer to scar tissue. It is trained by exposure plus consequence: years of shipping work under judgement, watching what a market rewards and what it quietly ignores, being wrong in front of clients and adjusting. You cannot download the repetitions.
I wrote before that you can borrow taste but you cannot borrow a standard. Both halves matter here. Borrowed taste gets you a moodboard. Applied taste is the next thousand decisions inside a real project with real stakes, and those cannot be borrowed, copied, or generated, because each one only exists at the moment it is made.
The taste layer
When execution becomes abundant, the craft does not disappear. It moves up. Direction, selection, refusal: deciding what gets made, choosing the one option that is right, and killing the ninety-nine that are merely fine. The tools raise everyone's floor. Taste still sets the ceiling, and the distance between the two is now the whole difference between studios.
This is why I am relaxed about AI in creative work and impatient with both camps shouting about it. The tools are genuinely brilliant, and they are brilliant at the part that was already becoming a commodity. They concentrate the value of the part that was not.
Commodities are what markets can compare on price, and markets can only compare what looks the same. Execution looks the same now. The part of creative work that survives every tool change is the part that decides. That part does not commoditise.