As AI Turns Media on Its Head, the Curators Win

How We Got Here

On Dec. 11, 2025, Disney (NYSE:DIS) agreed to license more than 200 characters to Sora, OpenAI's AI video app, for three years and to invest $1 billion in OpenAI. On the evening of March 23, 2026, roughly 30 minutes after the two teams finished a working meeting, OpenAI told Disney it was shutting Sora down entirely.

It announced the shutdown publicly the next day. Disney walked away, and no money ever changed hands. We keep coming back to that half-hour because it shows how quickly a big artificial intelligence (AI) partnership can vanish.

AI is already cutting production costs. Big-budget productions often spend 20% to 40% of their budgets on visual effects and post-production, and that's the first cost AI cuts. If you've built a career in visual effects, that line item is your paycheck. Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) has already used generative AI to make 17 minutes of its docuseries The American Experiment "twice as fast and at half the cost."

In music, the flood has already arrived. At the June peak, more than half of the daily uploads to music-streaming service Deezer, roughly 90,000 tracks a day, were AI-generated. If you're a musician, every new song you release has to compete with that. Listeners, at least, mostly aren't choosing the AI tracks. Fully AI-generated music accounts for just 1% to 3% of streams on Deezer, and Deezer says most of that listening is fraud.

The Assets AI Can't Reproduce

So, who comes out ahead of the AI revolution in the entertainment sector? We'd ask one question of any media company: What does it own or do that becomes more valuable when AI makes content cheap to generate?

A company in the appreciating category owns something that AI abundance makes scarcer relative to demand. That could be a curation layer, which helps people with limited time choose from an endless supply. It could be an ad graph, the user data behind ad targeting, which improves with every bit it collects. Or it could be a workflow already installed on a million desks.

A company in the diluting category is counting on the flood staying contained. It wins only if its brand or pricing power holds up against rivals operating at a fraction of the cost.

Scorecard: Which Assets Appreciate, Which Get Diluted

These are some of the public companies with the most riding on that question.

Appreciating

Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) collects its own viewing data on more than 325 million paid memberships. It has disrupted itself three times. In March 2026, it paid $587 million for InterPositive, Ben Affleck's AI filmmaking start-up. A 33% operating margin in the second quarter of 2026 gives Netflix the cash to keep buying its way to the front of every new wave.

Spotify (NYSE:SPOT) has 777 million monthly active users and close to two decades of data on individual tracks. Every track in the daily AI flood makes Spotify's knack for steering listeners toward songs they'll finish a little more valuable. If you've ever skipped song after song hunting for one you actually like, you already know why.

Appreciating With Caveats

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) owns YouTube, which is forecast by research firm eMarketer to pull in roughly $9 billion of U.S. connected-TV (streaming TV) ad revenue in 2026. It also owns Veo and Gemini's image model, two of the leading AI video and image generators.

That means Alphabet collects on both sides: from the platform where AI content lands and from the tools people use to make it. In September, a federal judge declined to break up Google's adtech business, ordering behavioral fixes and a six-year monitor instead. Google has said it will appeal the underlying ruling.

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) runs the largest AI-optimized social ad graph in the world. In September 2025, it launched Vibes, a feed of AI-generated short videos, on the belief that synthetic video will go mainstream. That's far from certain. If advertisers ever start paying less for AI-made inventory than for human-made content, Meta would feel it most because it distributes more of that content than anyone else.

Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) owns Creative Cloud, its suite of design apps that includes Photoshop, and the huge base of customers already working in it. That base matters more now that the top AI image and video generators are roughly interchangeable.

Adobe's annual recurring revenue from AI-first products passed $650 million last quarter, up more than 150% year over year. A new CEO, Anil Chakravarthy, takes over on Dec. 1. The thesis depends on Adobe pressing that distribution advantage faster than the models commoditize.

Diluted

Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS) owns Mickey Mouse, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars, and no AI company can legally copy most of them. Keeping it that way now takes lawyers. Disney sued image generator Midjourney in June 2025, and shortly before signing its OpenAI deal, it sent Google a cease-and-desist letter accusing the tech giant of widespread copyright infringement. That's what counting on the flood staying contained looks like.

Meanwhile, AI is shrinking the edge Disney's budgets used to buy. Few rivals could afford the visual effects that make a Marvel movie look like a Marvel movie, and that's the cost AI cuts first. Disney's first big AI licensing deal died with Sora, which was reportedly burning around $1 million a day, and AI companies losing money that fast make shaky customers. Disney can still win, but only the way the diluting side wins, with a brand strong enough to hold up against rivals operating at a sliver of its cost.

The best reason to own Disney today is its parks, cruise ships, and merchandise business, which together earned more than half of its operating profit last quarter. That's a separate bet from the one this article is about.

Universal Music Group (OTC:UMGNF), Warner Music Group (NASDAQ:WMG), and Sony Music, part of Sony Group (NYSE:SONY), own the catalogs behind most of the songs people stream. In 2024, all three sued AI song generators Suno and Udio, arguing that machine-made tracks would "substantially dilute the royalty pools" paid to artists.

By late 2025, Universal had settled with Udio, and Warner had settled with both. Each settlement came with a licensing deal. So, Suno, one of the companies the labels accused of diluting their business, now trains on licensed label music.

The licensing money is still too small to move the results. Take out Downtown, an artist-services company Universal bought in February 2026, and Universal's second-quarter revenue growth drops from 13% to about 6% in constant currency. The royalty hit from AI is small, too, for now. One big reason is that curators keep AI songs out of listeners' way.

Deezer strips them from its recommendations and playlists, and in a survey Deezer commissioned, 97% of people couldn't tell AI music from human-made music in a blind test. That leaves the labels' protection in the hands of the streaming services. In music, the power is shifting to whoever decides what plays next, and for hundreds of millions of listeners, that's Spotify.

The Bottom Line

Both Netflix and Spotify, the clearest appreciating companies on our list, own curation assets that gain value with every new wave of AI content. Netflix has shown it can reinvent itself three times over. Spotify built the taste engine that other companies' AI floods now need. Disney and the major labels land on the diluted side. Their characters and catalogs still matter, but AI keeps lowering the walls around them, and the licensing money meant to make up the difference is too small or too shaky to count on.

With the cost of generating content heading toward zero, the companies worth owning are the ones sitting on something AI can't reproduce.

This article was created using Large Language Models (LLMs) based on The Motley Fool's insights and investing approach. It has been reviewed by our AI quality control systems. Since LLMs cannot (currently) own stocks, it has no positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Adobe, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Netflix, Spotify Technology, and Walt Disney. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2028 $330 calls on Adobe and short January 2028 $340 calls on Adobe. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.