AI video makes creative direction more valuable
Charles Curran’s Spencer Pratt videos are ridiculous.
…and kind of inspiring.
He’s been making these viral commercials for Pratt’s campaign to be LA’s new mayor. I am not here to talk about the politics of Spencer Pratt as mayor, mostly because I would like to keep my remaining grip on reality.
But the videos are worth paying attention to.
One of them is almost boringly good. Not boring as in bad. Boring as in… you can stop thinking about the AI after a few seconds and just watch the thing.
That’s new.
Some AI video still feels like it belongs in a Marvel AI-verse. Everything is too smooth. Too shiny. Too close to real, but not close enough. The faces do that haunted thing. The mouths don’t quite belong to the words. The camera moves like it learned cinematography from a dream.
This one mostly doesn’t feel like that.
Every clip, every character, every location… it just feels real. I have a hard time believing it wasn’t shot with a camera.
The AI isn’t perfect yet. You can still see the strange little tells in some shots. Some characters look a bit dead behind the eyes. But I know real people who look the same, so I’m not sure that counts anymore.
The obvious takeaway is that video production is going to get cheaper.
It will.
The other obvious takeaway is that AI video is going to get better.
It will.
But I don’t think either of those is the important part.
The important part is that creative testing is about to get much faster.
That changes the shape of the work.
A small team can explore a campaign world before they spend real money producing it. A founder can make a product story visible before hiring a crew. A brand can try ten directions before deciding which one deserves budget. A kid with a weird idea can make something that feels close enough to a real trailer, real ad, or real piece of entertainment for people to react to it.
That last part is the one I keep coming back to.
For most of modern production, the distance between the idea in your head and the thing someone else can watch has been huge.
You needed money. People. Equipment. Locations. Actors. Editors. Time. Permission. A lot of coordination. A lot of compromise.
Sometimes that friction made the work better. Constraints can do that.
But a lot of the time, the friction just killed the idea before it had a chance to become anything.
AI video changes that.
Not because it magically makes everything good. It won’t. It is going to create an unbelievable amount of slop. More bad ads. More fake movie trailers. More weird political content. More half-ideas that should have stayed in someone’s notes app.
Obviously.
But every creative medium does this when access expands.
When desktop publishing got cheap, we got a lot of terrible design. When digital cameras got cheap, we got a lot of terrible photography. When social video got cheap, we got a lot of terrible content.
We also got new voices, new formats, new businesses, and new creative languages that would not have survived the old gatekeepers.
I think AI video is going to rhyme with that.
The interesting question is not whether people will make bad AI videos. Of course they will.
The interesting question is what happens when people with taste, timing, humor, and a real point of view can make watchable things without waiting for permission.
That’s why I think creative direction becomes more valuable, not less.
When footage is expensive, access to production is a moat. When footage gets cheap, the moat moves.
It moves to taste.
It moves to judgment.
It moves to knowing which idea deserves to exist in the first place.
It moves to knowing what emotion you’re trying to create, when the joke actually lands, what reference matters, what the audience already understands, and what needs to happen in the first three seconds so they don’t leave.
That’s not prompt engineering.
That’s creative direction.
And it’s the same pattern I keep seeing everywhere with AI.
The machine takes over more of the production layer. The human work moves up a level.
Not away from the work. Up the work.
Less time spent fighting the blank page, or the empty timeline, or the missing budget.
More time spent asking: what are we actually trying to make someone feel? What should exist? What is almost right, but not there yet? What should we throw away even though the machine made it look expensive?
That last question matters more than people think.
AI will make things look more finished than they are.
A weak idea can now arrive with lighting, music, camera movement, and fake production value. That is dangerous because it can trick you into thinking the idea is better than it is.
So the job becomes editing. Taste. Rejection. Direction. Knowing when the output is impressive and still wrong.
That’s why I don’t buy the boring version of the future where someone types a prompt and gets a finished commercial.
That will happen. It will also mostly be forgettable.
The better version is that teams can explore worlds earlier. Test product stories faster. Make weird ideas visible before everyone in the room talks them back into something safe.
For entertainment, that means more people get to make things.
For marketing, it means more ideas can be tested before real money gets involved.
For creative jobs, I think it means the lower-value production tasks get squeezed, but the people who can direct, judge, shape, and connect ideas get more powerful.
Maybe that is optimistic.
I am generally optimistic about more people getting access to creative tools.
Not because every new creator will be good.
Most won’t be.
But because the old system filtered out a lot of people for reasons that had nothing to do with taste or talent.
No budget. No network. No crew. No permission. No path from idea to artifact.
AI video weakens those filters.
That does not mean the work gets easier.
It means more people can enter the work.
The winners won’t be the people who can type prompts. That skill will commoditize almost immediately.
The winners will be the people with taste, feedback loops, emotional intelligence, story sense, and a clear point of view.
So yes, the Spencer Pratt videos are ridiculous.
But they are also a pretty good preview of where creative production is going.
More slop is guaranteed.
So is a much larger creative surface area.
And if the distance between having an idea and making someone feel it keeps shrinking, the people who understand story are going to matter more than ever.