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A more obvious example is The Blair Witch Project, which cost less than a million dollars even after all the marketing was done (and cost essentially nothing to make).
The original Halloween was a very low-budget movie considering how long it took to shoot.
Vin Diesel's career was established by his own movie, Strays, which cost less than $50K. Which is zero budget, essentially, for a film that opened at Sundance.
Away from films there are many, many examples of massively popular albums and songs that were made essentially for nothing off the back of simple constraints and creativity.
In the long run, the only way artists will use AI effectively is by deciding on constraints that limit its use.
Because as soon as you don't limit its use, anyone can do what you can do.
So I tend towards thinking that AI won't really move the needle in terms of human creativity. It may reframe it. But nobody is going to be liberated creatively by it.
Tech people, I suspect, tend to assume that AI brings "full creative freedom" to artists the same way a patron does when they say "you can have full creative freedom".
It's not the same kind of freedom.
