AI video generation is probably the most impressive thing happening in generative AI right now. This is a snapshot of where it stands in mid-2026: what we have, what it feels like to use, and what it is doing to the internet — the wonderful part and the noisy part.
Over the last couple of years I have played with basically everything on the market: Seedance, Midjourney, Luma, Hailuo, Kling, Vidu, Sora, Veo, Happy Horse, Runway and all the others. If you ask me today, at the moment this article is being written, my best option is Seedance. But honestly, I use all the others at mostly the same pace — some of them perform really well on short animations, without too much complexity and with less credit burn. Different scenes ask for different tools, and this landscape reshuffles itself every few months anyway.
And the technology itself? It is wonderful right now. Two years ago AI video meant warping faces and melting hands. Today a still image breathes: hair drifts, light changes, a camera moves through a scene with real weight. Watching one of your own artworks come to life for the first time is a feeling I still have not gotten used to.
The honest downside: it is still expensive most of the time. And we have the same problem we always had with images — a lot of tries wasted until one good video comes out. The difference is that a wasted video costs many times more than a wasted image. Credits evaporate fast, and the try-error-try loop that every creator knows becomes a real budget question at video prices.
Thankfully, consistency is way better now, and image references are really playing their part — amazingly so. You feed the model a still, and the character, the palette, the mood survive the animation. For someone like me who starts from finished artworks, this changed everything: the video serves the image, instead of the model reinventing your art halfway through the clip.
Now the bad part, and it needs to be said: we are living on a mountain of AI video slop that nobody asked for. Feeds that used to be good are drowning in generated noise. On YouTube you need to be careful not to get excited about the new 'Iron Man 5' trailer — because it is probably fan-made. When generation became this easy, quantity exploded, and the internet has not figured out the filtering yet.
But here is the good part, and it matters more: creativity became the priority. Many people who until now had their ideas only inside their minds are finally free to show them to the public. And a lot of that content is genuinely fun, creative and good. That is a beautiful thing — an entire generation of stories that used to die in someone's imagination now gets to exist. I just wish it was easier to filter.
So that is mid-2026: the tools are wonderful, the costs still sting, image references quietly changed the game, and the feed is a mess of trash and treasures. The technology arrived. The curation did not — yet.