“Content creation has never been easier.” This is a line that anyone who has engaged with content creation over the past decade must have heard every year. The technologies for creating, editing, and distributing content have been evolving at a lightning-fast pace, making it easier to make content every year. With Generative AI, content creation has become exponentially easier. From idea to live content, time can be as low as seconds. We have some ideas about the significant shifts in content creation in 2026 and what to consider.
Here are our predictions:
The value of pre-production will increase.
Technology makes the production process easier. However, the quality of a creation is not determined solely by ease of creation but by many other factors. A creator’s sense of taste, the depth of preparation, and the thoughtfulness invested in the content all reflect in the final content. The consumers appreciate these things. Relying too heavily on AI to improve content quality will not work unless you improve your taste and your practice of outlining what you intend to create in the first place.
AI tends to shift from a tool to a master when the user lacks knowledge, confidence, or clear expectations. When you ask AI to create the image of a man on a bicycle, it may generate the man on a bicycle on a transparent background, or a man on a bike wearing a hat, or a man on a bicycle in a street, or many other possibilities. If you did not start from knowing what you wanted, your subsequent steps will be modified by AI. You will accept the hat, the background, and the cycle design as AI-generated. You will embrace elements that you did NOT think of yourself. This is beneficial for an expert, but for a novice, it can be disastrous, as they may start offloading thinking to AI. And in doing so, they will likely lose their authenticity and originality. And they will begin to sound and feel like AI slop.
The best way to protect yourself, your originality, and your value to the consumers of your content is invest heavily in pre-production. Write your ideas in detail and storyboard them as thoroughly as possible. Read more. Consume more. Contemplate more. All these things make you a better thinker and planner. And better thinkers and planners will create better content, which more people will consume.
Short-form content will continue to grow rapidly, but will become more interconnected.
Since the rise of TikTok, short-form content has exploded. Instagram reports over 20 billion dollars in business revenue solely from Reels. YouTube Shorts have similar growth. It is not expected to slow down in 2026. There is, however, a shift that is more likely to occur, mainly due to AI. AI image, video, and audio generators are becoming increasingly sophisticated. In 2025, there were significant advances in the quality and control afforded to creators of AI models that produce this media. This is making short-form content easier to create, from B-roll to full-length videos. In parallel, users are beginning to identify “AI content” and to be “turned off” by undeclared AI content. They do NOT want to be fooled.
If someone is producing AI content, they want to see consistent quality. If the original author creates the content, they want to know more about their story or to go in-depth into their content. This is leading to a series of videos becoming more critical. We’re seeing creators taking a “30-day creation challenge” or adopting an episodic format for their videos, gaining more traction. This will be a significant lever for content creators in 2026.
Content will become more interactive.
This is the thesis we’re betting our careers on. We believe that, with significant shifts, storytelling tools become more accessible and the opportunities to provide a more immersive experience increase. The next level of immersive content for mobile devices is games. And with generative AI, game creation will become easier. Videos have already begun to function as interactive content. We’ve seen AR experiments on Snapchat, interactive stories on Instagram, and interactive videos on TikTok. All of these indicate the next significant step in content creation: shifting from a unidirectional approach to an interactive one. Creators can create immersive experiences with an AI game generator, such as Pikoo.ai, and distribute them on Pikoo and on other channels, including social media, websites, and applications. You can read more about our thesis at Pikoo Blog
Content creators will create much more than video content.
This is a shift that could only have occurred with generative AI. However, this shift is not about changes in content but in the abilities and roles of content creators. Traditionally, creators have monetized through ad revenues from social media platforms and brand deals. Another small section was monetized through platforms such as Patreon, where they offered more nuanced content to their specific audience and received direct payments from them. However, this is shifting over the years. As each step from production to distribution becomes easier, creators are increasingly producing, selling, and earning revenue from their own products. This product can be a community, a browser extension, a SaaS product, a newsletter, an application, or even a physical product, such as a food or fashion brand.
This ties into the larger trend that AI is redistributing abilities to create anything and everything. It is democratization, not just content creation. However, those who specialize in content creation for a specific niche typically also understand its particular pain points and can therefore be better at developing products for that niche. There are examples of both successes and failures of content creators becoming product creators, but these are early experiments. The overall trends indicate that this will become more common in 2026.
The “AI slop” correction will NOT happen in 2026
This is a controversial take that we have. While 2024 and 2025 saw increases in AI waste in both demand and consumption, some theories suggest that this will begin to decline in the near future. Barring some creators raging on social media, especially Reddit, we DO NOT observe a significant shift in that direction. In fact, there is a large majority of content consumers who are still entirely unaware of AI and believe everything is “real. We’re still in the early years of AI content. The AI slope will continue to find a large audience in 2026. We will, in fact, see more AI slop being created and distributed by creators in 2026, and it will be freely consumed.
While this trend is expected to occur in 2026, there is considerable uncertainty surrounding it for the individuals creating it. We DO NOT recommend turning yourself into an “AI Slop creator”. We encourage you to use AI as a tool to find, refine, and amplify your voice.
There are a few more predictions in our bag, but this blog is too long. We’ll include those in the coming blogs. Hope this helps.
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