The real cost of AI content isn’t the subscription fee; it’s creators becoming unpaid data suppliers. As each prompt feeds the system, the industry is on the verge of slipping into dystopia. The risk isn’t automation. It’s quiet extraction.
As CEO and Co-Founder of Emmy-nominated immersive animation studio 2immersive4u, Dusan Simic has spent his career on the front lines of where technology and art collide. Now, he’s raising a red flag about how AI might be reshaping creativity not just through automation, but through subtle exploitation.
In a galaxy very, very close: “My main concern, despite all the good stuff, is that we might all just be creating synthetic data for some big corporation,” Simic says. “It sounds like the start of a sci-fi trailer.” He points to the “moral ambiguity” of the current AI race, where the lines between good and bad actors are blurry. “The pace is just too fast. We see kids replacing their friends with chatbots in chat rooms. We need to understand this in a broader way.”
Creative vs. criminal: That "sci-fi" concern has immediate, practical dangers, from using voice cloning to breach online banking systems to spreading false information. “There are a lot of things that can go wrong,” Simic says. “It’s always 50/50. Some people will find this technology incredibly useful for greater purposes, and some people will find it as just one more step to abuse something.”
Half artist, half algorithm: “The ones who will have the most use of it right now are those in hybrid models—people from traditional fields like 3D animation or journalism who can incorporate this into their own workflow,” says Simic. “That's the way to go.” The winners won’t be purists or full-on tech evangelists; they’ll be the ones who can straddle both worlds. The future belongs to creatives who know how to speak both human and machine.
In the trenches: Simic isn’t just theorizing; he’s a practitioner. He uses ElevenLabs’ latest models in his own work for commercials, short films, and even his company’s anime series, Pixel Saga. He highlights the ability to add emotional cues in parentheses as a game-changer for creating believable characters.
“Musicians I know are already replacing their expensive sound banks with ElevenLabs,” he adds. “You have an online sound bank where you just type what you want.” For Simic, this accessibility is a catalyst for something bigger: a convergence where voice, sound, and visuals are no longer separate disciplines but are embedded together into singular multimedia projects. He sees it as a move toward a “singularity of multiple art forms converging into one.”
Fair play, fair pay: Simic says the only way to move forward responsibly is to bake ethical frameworks into the system itself. “It would be nice to say, ‘Hey, this is the actor who did the voice cloning with ElevenLabs for a certain commercial,’” he says. “I think that's just fair. It would be nice to mention not just the company, but the people who brought it to life.”
A creative renaissance: Simic sees the hybrid approach as a spark for a creative renaissance and a chance to decentralize the industry. “What I'm most excited to see is the hybrid model between AI and live actors. I'd love to see more studios doing this, so we can create new creative hubs in smaller cities—not just LA or New York—where the next generation of artists can truly express themselves.”