Leaving 2025 Behind: Six Hopes for AI and Creativity in 2026

It has been a wild year for AI and visual storytelling. When OpenAI’s Sora video model dropped in late 2024 we had the abstract “Gold Record” from Paul Trillo and a clever video from Shy Kids about a guy with a balloon for a head. These videos show how far AI filmmaking has come. Back then artists worked around the weaknesses of the form. There were rarely shots from the same scene, fast cuts to hide imperfections, and relying on traditional quality sound design to lift the storytelling. At the time, I recognized its potential, but didn’t yet see the professional application. After starting Origen Story this year and diving deep on AI workflows, I can now create animated videos like this one about Catalonia's poop log tradition, Caga Tió, that would have been impossible a year ago.

Beyond filmmaking, I've been using AI-assisted coding in my interactive media projects. This year I built The Terror of War visual analysis for the AP using Cursor. I’ve built projects using Astro, Sveltekit, and other tools and frameworks I had been too intimidated to approach in the past. What had always been my weakness - knowledge of the latest frameworks - was now being backfilled with AI. I was still planning the architecture and narratives of these projects, but now I had a coach in my back pocket who knew the latest trends and approaches to consider in my execution.

With so many unexpected changes in 2025, what will 2026 bring? These are my hopeful expectations for the coming year.

AI Agents That Actually Work

I've been mostly underwhelmed by agents in 2025. The more I've used them and watched them in action, the more I've seen them trip over themselves and I’ve wondered if they're actually increasing productivity.

Despite this skepticism, I’m starting 2026 by embracing more sophisticated agentic approaches to my business. There are aspects of running any small business that are boring, time-consuming, probably replicable by machines, and where it doesn't make sense to hire outside help: summarizing industry reports, some bookkeeping tasks, scheduling reminders, and lead follow-ups."

If I’m right, and this is the year where agents start to become a regular feature of our lives, it could end up being very disruptive for large organizations and many industries. But I also hope it empowers smaller businesses while creating new opportunities.

C2PA and Content Credentials gain traction

I'm optimistic because this is happening faster than expected in late 2025. Content Credential icons on generated images are becoming commonplace on LinkedIn and C2PA implementation is growing more robust. But we still aren't at a place where all C2PA signatories are fully integrating them on their platforms. Also, big players like Apple and X are still not contributing. Hopefully 2026 is the year they finally get on board and we have a universal open standard we can all work towards improving.

Better information ecosystems

We are at the start of a new epoch of information overload. We need better ways to sort, filter, prioritize and make sense of the firehose of content. AI agents will likely play a role in this, and content credentials will be useful in establishing frameworks for trust. I'm at the point where I don't believe anything I see online without some form of verifiable content credential or provenance marker. I hope by the end of 2026, these markers are so ubiquitous that we can filter out content of unknown origin and finally make it harder for bot farms and foreign influence operations to infiltrate information ecosystems with low-effort rage bait.

Better rights, licensing and creator compensation

The battle in this area is just beginning, and it feels unbelievably complex, with dozens of copyright cases in U.S. courts right now. We're also transitioning into an agentic world where information will be researched and prioritized by computers, and more data will be needed for training future models. It's not good for everyone to have a world where it's hard to surface high-value information from slop. My hope is that creators of original content and well-executed ideas (even those using generative AI) start getting compensated for their value.

These are important issues that can inspire anger, fear and a sense of systemic unfairness. Even so, I don’t think it justifies avoiding AI use altogether. These are difficult but navigable problems, and no matter how we as a society address them, these technologies will be with us. But it would be nice if we had a more robust value chain instead of one that best positions tech companies to profit through mass extraction. I hope in 2026 we take a much-needed step in that direction. This means resolving some of the unanswered questions about rights, ownership and fair use, then building towards a more equitable system of licensing and compensation.

AI art professionalizes and feels more human

The realism and visual quality of image and video models is truly impressive just a year later. High-level VFX are now accessible to productions that couldn't have dreamed of it before. There are still ethical and legal minefields to navigate, but real progress has been made in visual quality in 2025. However, AI character performances still feel hollow. We're just starting to see performance capture workflows where the micro expressions of dramatic performance carry over into generative frames. My hope is that this technology becomes viable and accessible in 2026, so we can more easily bring human emotion into these workflows through a mix of better performance capture and hybrid filmmaking techniques.

We move from fear and helplessness to agency and action

I'm very much looking forward to saying goodbye to 2025. It's been one of the slowest job markets I've witnessed in my multi-decade career. The NGO sector where I've done a lot of impactful work was devastated this year and global development is still trying to find a way forward. Journalism is struggling even more than usual.

Yet despite all this, my hope is that this transformative moment allows us to reset some of our mistakes from the past information epoch. Maybe we shouldn't give news and well-crafted content away for free. Maybe social media should be tuned towards community building, not endless engagement at all costs. Maybe we still have the chance to realize the early promise of the Internet of bringing humanity together for peace and prosperity. I'm not predicting it or even betting on it. But that's my hope for 2026.