AI series The Arc cost $38,000 in AI credits for 83 minutes

The AI-made sci-fi series "The Arc" cost its filmmakers about $38,000 in AI credits for roughly 83 minutes of finished video, according to Business Insider.

That is the filmmakers' own accounting, reported on October 11 by Business Insider's Kelsey Vlamis. It divides to about $458 per finished minute of the series: $38,000 across 83 minutes. The same story puts the spend at about $7,600 in AI credits per episode, and $7,600 multiplied by five episodes comes to $38,000.

"The Arc" is a five-episode sci-fi action series directed by Darin Stewart and executive produced by Simone Ferretti, an AI content creator. It is set in a near-future America and follows an incarcerated veteran, redesignated only as FIVE, who fights through deadly historical simulations to buy a cure for his dying son. Artlist, which greenlit the series, calls it its first original AI series. It is free to watch on Artlist TV. Business Insider reports the series needed no human actors, no sets and no props or costumes.

Episode budgets of $7,600 land in a documented range for AI production when spread across the episodes' runtimes. Business Insider reports episodes range from 10 to 22 minutes, so a fixed $7,600 works out to about $345 per minute on a 22-minute episode and $760 per minute on a 10-minute one. invideo, a competing AI video platform, publishes an FAQ page documenting five of its own productions, with per-finished-minute costs running $315 to $750 across them. The Arc's per-minute figures sit at the top of that band.

Scenes were generated primarily using Seedance and Kling, two AI video models, Business Insider reports. Stewart said one shot could require eight to 10 generations, and that the team held costs down by generating its first passes at a lower resolution and raising the output quality only once it had the result it wanted. Per Business Insider, the scripts started as a 10-minute verbal brain dump per episode fed to Anthropic's Claude, with ShotDeck and Figma for character sheets and mood boards and Google's Nano Banana Pro and GPT Image 2 for stills. Artlist's own blog says every frame was built using Artlist Studio.

The vendor pages for the two models frame the per-shot math. Kling's own credit guide lists native 4K output on its VIDEO 3.0 series at 30 credits per second, so one 5-second pass at 4K costs 150 credits and eight to 10 passes would burn 1,200 to 1,500 credits for a single shot: 150 times eight is 1,200, and 150 times 10 is 1,500. The lower-resolution passes the team favored would cost less. Dreamina, which hosts ByteDance's Seedance, lists a Seedance 2.5 rate of $0.097 per second at 720p with a reference video on an eligible annual plan, or about $0.49 for a 5-second generation.

Artlist supplied the credits and greenlit the series. Its blog dates the idea to the end of April 2026, with Artlist signing on 48 hours later and the finished series arriving three and a half months after that. The series had a private premiere at London's Electric Cinema on August 18, 2026. "We've never been given the budget or opportunity to go to Japan and film a battle scene," Stewart said of his team, all of whom came from traditional entertainment.

For a creator, the retry rate drives the bill. Eight to 10 generations per shot means the cost scales with iteration, which is why the team's low-resolution first passes and its quality checkpoints matter more than the model choice.

The Arc is free to watch now on Artlist TV at artlist.io/tv/the-arc.