The stigma of 'easy' AI: Why we’re undervaluing a new form of craft

Professional AI filmmaking demands just as much discipline, vision and technical craft as any traditional medium and dismissing it as effortless risks undervaluing a new form of artistry, writes Marie-Céline Merret, head of creative technology and AI at MADE THIS.

AI-generated films sit in a curious place in the cultural imagination. On one hand, they spark awe: surreal visuals, impossible scenes, cinematic moments brought to life by lines of code. On the other, they’re often dismissed as gimmicky or “not real art.”

The assumption is that creating with AI is effortless, a matter of typing a few prompts and letting the machine do the rest.

But that assumption doesn’t reflect reality. Crafting commercial-grade, polished film with AI is not about shortcuts. It demands the same painstaking dedication to detail, storytelling, and craft as any traditional medium, layered with deep technical fluency.

The best AI creators are not dabblers; they are obsessive in both their artistry and their technical command. Many come from backgrounds as editors, VFX artists, animators, designers, or directors; careers built on honing creative skills now applied to a new medium.

Where the stigma starts

Skepticism comes from how most people first encountered AI: early outputs from tools like Midjourney or Runway were fascinating but crude, better suited to memes than storytelling. This shaped the perception that AI equals novelty, not craft.

Media narratives reinforced the “prompting myth” the idea that all it takes to make a film is typing a phrase into a box. When the output looks finished, people assume the process must have been quick and easy. But this is no truer than assuming a photograph is effortless because a camera captures it in a fraction of a second.

We’ve seen this before: Photoshop was once derided as “fake art,” digital cameras as cheating. New tools always provoke debates about authenticity. AI is simply the latest chapter only moving much faster.

The reality of AI craft

Behind every compelling AI film lies a process as rigorous as any traditional production. It’s not about pressing buttons; it’s about iteration, trial and error, art direction, refinement, and a lot of hand work to shape outputs into vision.

AI filmmakers storyboard, test, and rework scenes endlessly. They craft prompts with the precision of screenwriters. They train, fine-tune, and stitch together workflows to achieve tone, pacing, and emotion. A single two-minute sequence might require hundreds of outputs, layered and composited to reach the desired effect.

Take the work of Henry Daubrez a former designer turned AI filmmaker whose short film Kitsune, built with Google’s Veo model, shows how true storytelling and meticulous craft can merge with AI to create something cinematic and moving.

The best practitioners aren’t just artists but also savvy with technical language as well as engineers of their own workflows. They move between code and canvas, experimenting across tools to gain greater control. This hybrid - part filmmaker, part technologist is what separates hobbyist experiments from professional-grade storytelling.

The Value Question

The real danger is not that AI will replace craft, but that society will undervalue it. By assuming AI content is “easy,” we risk dismissing the enormous artistry and technical innovation behind professional-grade work and therefore undermining creators and artists of our industry.

Yes, AI can reduce production costs and timelines, but value doesn’t lie in the software. A scene has no worth if it doesn’t tell a story, evoke emotion, or reflect an artist’s perspective. Just as owning a camera doesn’t make someone a filmmaker, access to AI tools doesn’t make someone a storyteller.

Value resides in the artistry, not the instrument. Instead of declaring that advertising or filmmaking is dead, we should acknowledge that it’s evolving.

Lastly, brands will need to start grasping the value of a branded piece of work, whether it’s made with AI or with a traditional method that output should have the same standard production value that you expect from any professional team.

So, let’s stop asking about cheap content solutions and start being curious about all the things that Ai enables; more creativity, more weirdness, the impossible, there are literally a million ways that a brand can benefit from AI in the content space beyond just cost efficiencies.

The future of AI film

AI is already enabling what was once impossible: vast landscapes without permits, crowd scenes without extras, and worlds built entirely from imagination. It allows stories to be told at scales and speeds previously unimaginable.

The OMNI AI Film Festival is a great example proving that narrative driven work is really emerging from the most unexpected talent out there and it's a new wave of film work that is arising. With George Miller as the headline judge on the panel we can safely say that Hollywood is getting onboard with it and they are most definitely training their models on their IP.

The question isn’t whether AI films are “real.” They already are. The question is who will wield this medium with enough craft and vision to shape its future. A handful already are and they’re setting the bar high.

AI is not an escape from craft. It demands more of it. To create meaningful, high-quality work requires artists who are as obsessed with story as they are with technology.

The stigma of “easy AI” misunderstands what’s really happening: a new medium is emerging, one that combines human imagination with machine capability. Those who take it seriously, the obsessive, the detail-driven, the visionary are not diminishing craft. They are expanding it.

The artistry has never been in the tool. It has always been in the hands of the artist.