Why Real People Are Becoming More Valuable in the Age of AI
Theres obviously a huge amount being said about AI at the moment, particularly around content creation, marketing and video, and most of it seems to fall into one of two camps, either AI is going to completely change everything and replace huge parts of the creative industry, others are desperately arguing that its only useful for first passes at best.
The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.
AI is already making it much easier to create content quickly and cheaply. You can generate scripts in seconds, create high quality imagery, produce compelling voiceovers, edit video much faster than before and, increasingly, create realistic presenters without ever needing to put an actual person in front of a camera.
For businesses, that obviously provides some level of value.
It lowers the barrier to entry, it means smaller companies can produce much more content, and it gives marketing teams access to tools that would have cost significantly more money just a few years ago.
But I think theres another side to it which is probably more interesting.
The easier it becomes to create polished content, the less impressive polished content becomes. And that potentially makes real people more valuable, not less.
High-end professional content is becoming easier to produce
Historically, if a business wanted something that looked truly professional, particularly in the world of video, there was a reasonable cost involved.
You required cameras, lighting, sound, an editor, filmmaker/ director and generally a reasonable amount of time and budget to pull everything together.
Thats changing very quickly.
A small business can now generate visuals, scripts, voiceovers & basic video content with relatively little effort, and the quality is improving all the time.
I dont really see that as a bad thing either. There are loads of situations in which businesses need something quick, clear and functional – AI is going to make that much easier.
But once everyone has access to the same tools, the tools themselves stop being much of an advantage.
If every company can generate a high-end explainer video, a polished social post or a fairly convincing presenter-led piece of content, then looking polished on its own doesnt really make you stand out.
At that point, the question becomes what actually makes somebody stop, watch and invest in what theyre seeing.
And I think more and more of that comes back to the individual & creativity behind it.
People still want to know who theyre dealing with
This is particularly true with anything involving a reasonably considered purchase.
If somebody is spending a decent sum of money, choosing a supplier, trusting a company with an important project or making a decision that carries some risk, they generally want to know who is actually behind the business.
You can obviously write a polished piece of copy explaining why your company is brilliant, your background, reviews etc.
You can now even generate somebody to stand there and deliver the message perfectly.
But theres still something different about watching the founder of a business explain why they started it, or seeing an engineer talk about something theyve spent years working on, or hearing a customer explain in their own words what actually happened when they used a service.
Those things tend to have little imperfections in them.
People pause.
They think.
They laugh.
They use the wrong word and correct themselves.
They say something slightly differently to the way the marketing team would have written it.
And quite often, thats exactly what makes it believable, and more importantly credible.
The best answer is rarely the perfect one
We see this all the time when filming interviews.
Youll sometimes get an answer where somebody says everything exactly as planned. Its technically perfect, there are no mistakes, they hit every message and youd think that would obviously be the take you use.
Then they answer it again, slightly less perfectly, and theres a pause somewhere, or they smile halfway through, or they phrase something in a way nobody expected, and that ends up being the version that makes the final edit – authenticity.
It just feels better.
More natural.
More like an actual person talking rather than somebody delivering a scripted line.
Thats one of the things I think becomes more important as AI-generated content gets better.
The aim of good production isnt to remove every trace of humanity from somebody until they sound like a presenter.
Its usually the opposite.
Youre trying to get them comfortable enough that they stop thinking too much about the camera, forget theyre being filmed and start talking in the same way they would if they were having a conversation with another person.
Thats quite hard to fake convincingly.
Most businesses are sitting on better content than they realise
The slightly ironic thing is that a lot of companies already have loads of potentially interesting content inside the business, they just dont necessarily think of it that way.
Founders have stories.
Staff have expertise.
Customers have experiences.
Engineers know things nobody else in the marketing team knows.
People working directly with customers understand the questions and objections that come up every single day.
But traditionally, businesses have often hidden all of that behind fairly corporate spiel.
The company talks as the company, rather than letting the people inside it talk.
AI could actually be really useful here, because it makes it much easier to take one conversation or interview and turn it into loads of different content afterwards, but the starting point still has to be something worth listening to.
Thats probably the question businesses should be asking more often.
Not what content can we generate?
More, who have we got that people would actually want to hear from?
The role of a production company is changing as well
I think this applies to production companies too.
If the value of professional production was purely access to expensive cameras and editing software, then yes, AI and cheaper technology would obviously be a massive problem.
But thats never really been the most important part of the job.
The camera is the easy bit.
The harder bit is knowing what to ask, getting somebody comfortable, spotting when theyve said something genuinely useful, understanding what the audience needs to hear and then turning hours of footage into something that delivers real value.
Good video production services are increasingly less about simply making something look good and more about getting the results from the content.
Obviously the production still matters.
You still need good sound & lighting, decent framing and an edit that holds together.
But ideally the viewer shouldnt really be thinking about any of that.
They should be thinking about what the person is saying.
A beautifully shot interview where somebody says absolutely nothing interesting is still a bad interview.
Testimonials are a really obvious example
Customer testimonials are probably one of the clearest examples of where this matters.
Businesses have always been able to tell people theyre good at what they do.
AI just makes it easier to produce more polished versions of that message.
Whats much harder to manufacture is a real customer sitting down and explaining what their problem was, why they chose a company and what actually changed afterwards.
Thats why the best testimonials arent really testimonials in the traditional sense.
Theyre stories.
There was a problem.
Something wasnt working.
They needed to fix it.
They considered their options.
They made a decision.
Then there was an outcome.
Professional testimonial video production works best when you allow somebody to tell that story naturally rather than handing them a list of things you want them to say.
If anything, I think that kind of content becomes more valuable in an environment where audiences are increasingly aware that almost anything can be generated.
AI is still going to be incredibly useful
None of this is really an argument against AI either.
Were already using it in parts of the production process and Id imagine that will only increase.
There are loads of repetitive jobs that can be done much quicker.
Research before interviews.
Transcribing footage.
Logging huge amounts of content.
Finding sections of interviews.
Generating different edit ideas.
Turning one long interview into short-form clips, articles, social posts and loads of other useful material.
That side of it is genuinely exciting because it potentially means spending less time doing fairly mechanical work and more time on the bits that actually need judgement.
The mistake, in my view, would be using AI to remove the very thing that makes the content interesting in the first place.
The slightly strange outcome could be that AI makes human content more valuable
I think thats the bit people sometimes miss.
The assumption tends to be that as AI gets better, businesses will naturally move towards more synthetic content.
And they probably will in plenty of areas.
Therell be loads of situations where an AI presenter, generated voice or automated video is absolutely the right choice.
But if the internet ends up flooded with perfectly polished, perfectly written, perfectly delivered content, then the stuff that feels slightly less perfect but genuinely human will likely stand out more.
If everybody can produce a high-end video, then production quality alone isnt enough.
If everybody can generate endless amounts of copy, then publishing more content isnt enough.
And if anybody can generate a flawless presenter reading a script, then seeing an actual person talk about something they genuinely know may become more persuasive, not less.
The businesses that do well probably wont be the ones that avoid AI. Theyll be the ones that use it properly, automate the boring bits, speed up the process and then use that extra capacity to put more real people, real expertise and real stories in front of their audience.
Which, slightly ironically, might mean the more artificial content there is, the more valuable the human content becomes.
