“AI is not what most of the people marketing AI are saying it is."
These are the words of School of Motion’s founder and CEO Joey Korenman, who has just published a course on the platform covering AI filmmaking.
You’d think his vested interest in the course’s success might inhibit his honesty surrounding the wider discussions around AI in the motion design community - not so here: “AI is not magic. It is not an “easy button.””
With any leap in technology there are always doomers, deniers and naysayers, but also on the other side of the same coin there are far too many people who naively believe in the coming of some sort of golden age, desperate to cram it into any and all possible use cases when, quite frankly, it isn’t anywhere near ready or as efficient as the ‘old fashioned way’. The truth, as it often is, is far murkier and nuanced than either side would have you believe.
Motion design has always been made by humans for humans, and can only really be deemed ‘good’ by the human viewing it. As Fanta have shown with their Halloween (in August, I might add) horror character crossover campaign, the wider public outside of the experts are not yet ready to accept the uncanny valley of AI in mainstream advertising.
As for clients, what happens when they want a specific item, colour or other detail added or removed? Conventional wisdom suggests AI is a great place to start, and in many cases it is… But you try getting that pink hairband off the woman’s head and onto her wrist in twenty different shots. And now make it pink… Actually let’s put it back in her hair... This isn’t a complaint against AI perse, but the perception AI has in the circles who frankly, won’t ever use it themselves. As Joey says, it’s not an ‘easy button’.
AI is dominating headlines everywhere and, as a piece of content, this will be more white noise in that whiter than snow, noisier-than-loud online world we now all exist in - alongside the machines so many are raging for or against.
The first photographs taken looked much worse than the paintings that preceded them, and whilst the possibility is there that AI videography is our next ‘photograph’, I can’t shake (like a polaroid) the feeling that we’re a long way away from standing still for fifteen minutes waiting for the image to process. If and when that process does happen, though, I don’t doubt it will still be a professional operating the camera, despite how ‘easy’ AI has made things for us.