Will AI just look budget?

I watch a lot of documentaries. So much so that the various advert themes of BBC Earth and the Nature Channel are my bedtime lullabies. Many are history documentaries. In times past, I did consulting work with everyone from universities to the Council of Europe on how to bring design and technology to history education. This turned into knowing a weirdly large amount of archeologists. All because I have always been fascinated with historical recreations. What did it look like? What was life like then? All that.

History documentaries don’t have the hugest budgets in the world. They recreate a Viking assault with 12 people, a lot of closeups and if they’re really feeling saucy, some off the shelf visual effects. Knowing people at the cutting edge of this new AI filmmaking thing and what they’re working on, I was thinking: Well here’s how history documentaries can do anything they want now for half the price. Well sort of, not really, but that’s a different article. But if the low budget documentaries become overrun with AI generated footage, will AI generated footage then become the budget look? A perhaps better question is has it already?