In 2026, content is no longer the scarce resource. Credibility is.
For most of the last decade, the creator economy rewarded the people who could package an idea into something watchable (and entertaining), then distribute it at scale. That game is not gone. It’s just no longer enough. AI has removed friction from creation, which means the internet is about to be flooded with outputs that look like creativity, look like authority, and sometimes even look like truth.
The resemblance is the problem.
Because when everything looks real, reality stops being the default assumption.
That’s why I think we’re entering a new phase of the creator economy. Reach was the first era. Community became the second. The next era is Trust. The winners will not simply be the loudest or the most consistent. They’ll be the most believable.
I felt that shift sharply over the last week at the 1 Billion Followers Summit in Dubai, held January 9 to 11, 2026. The official theme this year was “Content for Good,” and it brought the creator economy’s full cast into one place – creators, platforms, brands, and the people building the tools.
AI was in every single conversation. No surprise there.
What surprised me was the subtext. Not “how do we use AI.” Everyone will. The real question underneath everything was this:
How do we build trust when content becomes infinitely producible?
The evolution of content and the creator economy in 2026
AI‑generated content makes up a large and rapidly growing share of online material.
We’ve passed peak content. We’re now heading into peak scepticism.
When creation becomes effortless, supply explodes. When supply explodes, the average quality drops. When average quality drops, audiences protect themselves. They do not lean in. They lean back. You can feel it already in the way people consume.
This is where “AI slop” shows up. It’s the new spam. Not because it looks terrible. Sometimes it’s visually impressive. Sometimes it performs. But it’s low-intent, high-volume, and largely unaccountable. It fills the feed without building memory, meaning, or relationship.
People are pushing back to brainrot and are actively consuming more long form content – YouTube’s renaissance and the exponential rise of Substack are proof.
This forces a recalibration of authenticity.
For a while, authenticity got reduced to an aesthetic. Handheld video. Natural lighting. Unpolished captions. A kind of casualness that signalled “this is real.” In 2026, AI can mimic those cues on command. It can cosplay rawness at scale.
So authenticity stops being a vibe and becomes evidence.
Evidence looks like process and context. It looks like constraints. It looks like specificity that can’t be faked without effort. The difference between “trust me” and “here’s how this happened.”
This is also why brand worlds start to matter more, not less.
In an AI-saturated environment, a coherent world becomes a recognition system. Tone, visual language, recurring codes, POV, and values that compound over time. When your world is strong, generic output looks wrong immediately.
And then there’s the uncomfortable upgrade to the creator job description.
Creators are increasingly sensemakers. If your content touches culture, current events, health, finance, politics, or social issues, you’re shaping belief, not just engagement. That makes the creator economy a credibility economy whether anyone likes it or not. Verification, sourcing, and clarity about what’s synthetic versus lived stop being “nice to have.” They become survival.
With that context, the most important shift I took from the summit lands here.
AI filmmaking has crossed the credibility line. Now we’re arguing about taste.
AI, filmmaking, and the end of “we’ll see one day”
For years, AI video progress was discussed like a future tense hobby. Interesting demos. Promising experiments. The occasional uncanny clip that proved we were not there yet. That era is over. The old “Will Smith eating spaghetti” clip became a meme because it looked wrong in a very specific way. Familiar, but unsettling. It was the perfect symbol of “this isn’t ready.”
Now it plays a different role. It marks the distance travelled.
AI video moved from distorted and laughable to genuinely convincing fast enough that the pace itself became the headline. The cultural consequence is bigger than the technical one. When the audience’s default posture shifts from “that’s fake” to “that might be real,” you don’t just change content. You change trust.
At the summit, you could feel the tooling ecosystem splitting into two lanes. One lane is consumer-first creation. Fast, social-first, remixable, built for velocity. The goal is output, iteration, meme gravity. The other lane is professional production. Tools designed for workflows. Pre-vis, compositing, animation, editing, VFX; tools teams can actually build pipelines around.
This matters because once the stack stabilises, the constraint moves back to where it belongs. Taste. There’s also a reason “we’ll see one day” no longer applies. AI is already shipping inside real production processes. Not always as the headline. More often as the multiplier. Concepting faster. Exploring scenes. Building backgrounds. Pre-visualising worlds before anyone commits budget. Removing bottlenecks that used to kill ideas in a spreadsheet.
And that leads to the real disruption. Hollywood’s advantage has always been scale. Budget, staff, time, access. AI compresses scale. Smaller teams can prototype worlds, iterate scenes, and produce cinematic output at a speed and cost that used to require a studio. Studios won’t disappear. But the monopoly on scale will.
That’s why a new creator archetype is emerging. For the last decade, the breakout template was “MrBeast energy.” Scale, spectacle, format-first optimisation. It’s not a judgement. It’s the shape of what the internet rewarded.
Last week, I kept hearing a different ambition. Creators who want to be Spielberg or Tarantino. World-builders. Directors. Cinematic storytellers building IP, not just feeding an algorithm. AI does not replace that. It accelerates it. The edge still isn’t the tool. It’s writing, taste, pacing, and consistency. You cannot prompt your way out of mid. You can only upscale mid faster.
A useful symbol of where this is heading came through one of the summit’s biggest moments.
The 1B AI Film Award was positioned as the world’s largest AI film prize at $1 million, run in collaboration with Google Gemini. The 2026 winner was Tunisian filmmaker and designer Zoubeir ElJlassi for his short film Lily.
This matters less as “AI won an award” and more as what it signals. When institutions start legitimising AI-assisted filmmaking at that level, the debate shifts. Not “is this real filmmaking.” Instead, “what kind of filmmaking is this,” and “what standards do we expect from it.”
Luxury codes, surrealism, and why brand worlds become the advantage
Luxury has always sold a world, not a product. Codes, restraint, visual language, mystique, cultural credibility.
AI makes world-building faster. It also makes it dangerously easy to generate endless “cool visuals” that have no authorship. Surrealism becomes the obvious temptation here, because surreal outputs look impressive even when they mean nothing.
That’s where a lot of brands will get lazy.
Surrealism works when it expands a brand’s myth in a coherent way. When it feels authored. When it deepens the world. If it’s just “AI did a thing,” it becomes wallpaper. And wallpaper does not build trust.
In an AI era, “we used AI” will become meaningless quickly. Everyone will.
The advantage will be coherence. Your world is still unmistakable. Your taste is still visible. The output still feels designed, not generated.
So, how do we build trust in the era of AI slop?
Not by avoiding AI. That’s not realistic.
Trust will be built through standards, and through making reality legible again.
Creators and brands that win will show more process, not just more output. They will be clearer about what is synthetic, stylised, reconstructed, or lived. They will choose coherence over volume, because coherence compounds and randomness decays. They will treat AI as leverage for better work, not a factory for more work.
Jacquemus, as an example, is a brand that is winning within this context. Through clear visual repetition and identity. Fusing personal storytelling, experiential campaigns, and cutting-edge digital strategies, Jacquemus stands out amongst the sea of fashion brands.
Unlike traditional luxury houses, Jacquemus embraces a playful, human-centric approach, reimagining how brands interact with their audiences in the digital age, curating a world in which the author is clear. Generic AI output would be instantly recognisable.
AI raises the floor fast. It makes “decent” easy. It also raises the ceiling for people who already know how to tell a story, because it gives them leverage.
Novelty will fade. The slop will flood the feed.
And audiences will judge one thing, with brutal simplicity.
Is it any good?
In 2026, trust might be the most premium product left. The creators and brands who understand that now will still be standing when the AI noise becomes background radiation.
