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If you own a small business or run a nonprofit, you already know about the importance of authenticity and creativity when it comes to communicating with your customers, clients, and supporters. But for most people, regardless of their business size or goals, the attraction to AI tools and the promises they offer is hard to ignore. AI (and its producers) want you to believe you can create compelling content with a “click of a button,” and for minimal cost. AI, they claim, can produce quickly, meeting the endless demands for content and interaction. And we know deep down this isn’t true… but everyone else keeps using it. Maybe.

There’s one claim that seems quite believable, because we’ve been saying it long before AI came around. And that’s automation can speed your process and lower your costs. It’s a “good thing.” And that’s the aspect of AI and video production I’d like to explore.

The limitations of algorithm

We’ll ignore for a moment the fact that AI produced content often lacks emotional depth; that its creativity is limited to variations for work that already exists, prioritized by popularity and market saturation; that AI struggles to find and maintain brand voice and identity… but easily produces six-fingered hands. We’ll ignore how difficult it is to control the visual elements, and how stilted the voice-overs sound. Nope, I’m going to stick to the question of automation.

Long before we had AI, we’ve had computational tools that can identify, sort, monitor, and track various online processes, from email lists to social media mentions. So I won’t attribute those skills to AI. Currently— and well into the foreseeable future— AI cannot think strategically about the intersection of your customers, your “product”, and your goals. For nonprofits, this can be interpreted as your supporters, your services, and your goals. Three-way intersectionality is a weakness for AI, and AI processes fall completely apart when asked to plan strategies and predict outcomes that will align them. AI relies only on approaches that have already documented digitally, online, but with no relation to their success or failure. It may understand that kids love puppies, and puppy German shepherd videos are popular, and that you want to sell dog food. That’s a very, very simple equation. But it can’t factor in that kids don’t buy dog food, your city pet store caters largely to small dogs, and your brand is about happy, healthy dogs. Over time AI will produce variations on their puppy approach not only repetitively to you, but to every pet store in the country.

And here we return to some of the issues that I said I’d ignore: emotional depth, creativity, and identity. The real question isn’t whether AI can produce video marketing content (or any time of marketing content). It’s whether that content helps you reach your goals, builds your brand, and fosters a community. Most people turn to a video production company or professional when they realize that they don’t have the skills to physically produce their videos at the quality they wish for. Many production companies simply offer those technical skills. But there’s another set of skills that’s vital to success: it’s the ability to translate customer knowledge, product, brand, and goals into a visual form. AI fails so resoundingly because there are thousands of small decisions that go into film making that either support or undermine a video’s intention, from holding a shot for a reaction, to the color tones in a grade. The most successful video campaigns start with a discussion over all the elements, and this conversation happens before there’s a completed script or vision for the video.