NEWS

AI Changed Everything About Making

You can sit at a laptop and generate in seconds what used to take teams of editors, animators, colourists, sound designers, and post houses. The economics flipped. The speed is wild. The power is intoxicating.

And yet, in the race between AI, how it has always been done, or lo fi, it is the scrappy handheld human stuff and well made reality that keep winning hearts, minds, and wallets.

Think movies. The big spending Hollywood CGI festivals deliver an adrenalin rush. How many do you want to watch again? How much of the story lands after the high fades? Not many. Not much.

That should make every marketer and creator stop and think. AI is not losing because it is weak. It is losing because it is bad at being alive.

The Great Leveller

Ten years ago, a decent TVC or launch film needed a small army. Cameras. Crew. Edit suite. Sound design. Grading. Time. Money. Caffeine.

Now you can pre visualise entire campaigns before booking a location. Generate thirty social edits from one idea. Localise for fifteen markets without recording another voiceover.

AI levelled the field. It reduced cost. It removed excuses. A small team with a big idea can look like a global player overnight. That is extraordinary. It also floods the feed with work that looks and feels eerily similar. Slick. Clean. Shiny. Perfect. The same. And forgettable.

The Wall Nobody Talks About

AI is phenomenal at production mechanics. Creativity is not mechanical. It is messy, emotional, contextual, and political. That is where AI still hits a brick wall.

What the machines cannot do yet

1. Originality. AI does not dream. It averages. It remixes what already exists. Fine for volume. Fatal for differentiation.
2. Taste. The magic is often in the edit. Knowing what not to do. AI hands you two hundred usable options and lets you drown. It will not give you the nerve to pick the risky one that wins the pitch.
3. Context. AI does not know your brand scars, your client politics, or the thing Legal will kill because of that incident in 2019. Real strategy lives in those invisible spaces.
4. Emotion you can trust. AI can make people cry on screen. The audience still smells synthetic emotion. When belief goes, impact goes.
5. Consistency. Sometimes genius. Sometimes gibberish. You cannot build brand equity on maybe it works.

So yes, AI can make content. It cannot make commitment. The tool is not the idea.

Meanwhile, Lo Fi And Proven Production Eat The World

While brands debate going full AI, the lo fi revolution already happened. Phone shot product demos. Unscripted founder videos. Rough cut animations. Hand drawn explainers. Cardboard models. Stitched TikToks. Shaky behind the scenes reels. That is the work cutting through.

Why it works

1. Trust. Perfect visuals used to signal budget. Now they signal probably fake. Audiences forgive rough. They do not forgive fake.
2. Relatability. People do not want Hollywood. They want someone like them telling the truth, not selling the dream.
3. Speed. Culture moves by the hour. Lo fi lets you move with it. Film a reaction in your kitchen, post it, and be in the conversation before lunch.
4. Texture. Hand drawn, claymation, stop motion. You can feel the thumbprints. That tactile imperfection lands emotionally in a way AI cannot replicate.
5. Cost to impact. A two hundred pound founder video can do more commercial damage than a five hundred thousand pound CGI epic if it is honest, timely, and true. A fifty to one hundred thousand budget can shift the world if it stays with truth and reality.

In an AI CGI world, truth and reality become the premium. Lo fi wins because it feels human. It is not about polish. It is about proximity. And proximity is power.

The Audience Is Your Compliance Team

The public is the new compliance department. If you fake it, they call it out. If you polish too hard, they doubt it. If your testimonial sounds scripted, you are toast.

Five years ago the people saying no were Legal and Comms. Now it is TikTok comments. Authenticity is no longer a virtue. It is risk management.

AI makes faking easier. It also makes getting caught inevitable. The same tech that generates can detect. Feeds are full of fakes and AI nonsense. People run from it. It pushes them away.

AI Has A Real Role

This is not anti AI. AI is a weapon when aimed at the right parts of the process.

• Concept exploration: Need forty ideas for a pitch by tomorrow? AI gets you there. You bin most. It breaks the deadlock.
• Pre visualisation: Show the client what you mean before you shoot. That saves weeks and budget.
• Versioning and localisation: The unglamorous work of variants. AI eats that for breakfast.
• Post production clean up: Sky replacement, logo swaps, lighting fixes. Automated. That is pure margin.
• Accessibility: Auto translation, dubbing, voice clone sync. Small brands can look global.

AI should delete your pain, not your point of view. The smart play is not to let AI replace creativity. Let it remove friction so creativity can move faster.

The Brand Problem Nobody Wants To Admit

There is a danger in going all AI. If anyone can generate work that looks like yours, then your work is not yours. If a teenager with a GPU can clone your look, your aesthetic has no moat.

We all know the chrome liquids, glow gradients, dreamy camera moves. It is beautiful. It is also generic. The future look already became wallpaper.

Distinctiveness now has to come from things AI cannot fake.

• Your founder face.
• Your product unfiltered.
• Your people and how they actually talk.
• Your humour.
• Your story.
• Your imagination.
• Your truth.

Lo fi shows those things. AI smooths them out. If it looks like the future, it is probably already over.

What Wins Now

The answer sits in the middle. Use AI where it accelerates. Use humans where it matters. Good proven technique, sped up and powered by AI production.

A practical playbook

1. Pre production and post production: automate. Let AI handle storyboards, animatics, clean ups, and localisation. That is where money and hours disappear.
2. Capture reality for the core. Shoot real people, real product, real reactions. Keep the soul. Keep the dirt.
3. Keep human judgement. Someone with taste still has to say this line works and that one does not. This shot feels like us.
4. Move faster, not faker. Use AI to compress time, not truth.

That is how you get scale and soul in the same campaign. That is how you make creative that works and lasts.

The Final Truth

AI is rewriting how the industry works. It is not rewriting what makes people care. We still buy from brands we believe. We still share stories that feel alive. We still stop for what looks true.

AI can help us do more. It cannot make us mean more. Until it can capture human truth, not just simulate it, lo fi and reality keep the crown. Have fun with AI. Use it to speed up. Make budgets go further. Cameraless all in AI production is not the way.

In the end, people do not want perfection. They want proof. And proof is always handmade. And it is always real.