Generative-AI video systems are advancing at a pace that industry observers say is erasing the obvious flaws that once betrayed synthetic footage. Google’s Veo 3, Luma Labs’ Dream Machine, OpenAI’s Sora and Runway AI’s Gen-4—released between June 2024 and May 2025—now deliver near-cinematic visuals with synced dialogue and consistent characters. A recent recreation of the viral 2023 “Will Smith eating spaghetti” clip showed none of the distorted features that defined early versions, underscoring how quickly quality is improving. The gains are already reshaping production economics. Runway AI has signed agreements with Lionsgate and AMC Networks, and Lionsgate vice-chair Michael Burns says the studio can now generate a 10-second battle scene with “10,000 soldiers in a snowstorm” for a fraction of the previous multi-million-dollar cost. Startup Staircase Studio plans to release seven to eight AI-assisted feature films a year for under $500,000, while advertisers are turning to text-prompted tools to cut turnaround times. Supporters argue the technology lets creators iterate indefinitely and visualize concepts that once required large crews. Critics, including some film-school students and independent directors, warn of job losses, high energy use and unresolved copyright questions around training data. Georgia State University professor Elizabeth Strickler says model quality now improves “every week, sometimes every day,” making resistance harder even after the 2023 SAG-AFTRA deal that secured guardrails on performers’ likenesses. Research labs are simultaneously pushing underlying capabilities. A team at South Korea’s UNIST unveiled BF-STVSR, an algorithm that boosts both resolution and frame rate, at the 2025 CVPR conference, pointing to further gains in realism. With Hollywood, advertisers and tech firms all experimenting, executives and academics alike expect AI-generated video to become as integral to content creation as digital editing or computer graphics before it.