A lot of industries have been hit by the AI revolution in positive and negative ways over the past 3 years. As far as the creative industry is involved that solely relies on content creation, the effects are mostly negative, resulting in significant downgrade in quality standards.
Let’s take animation, for example!
Sure, there are some new A.I. companies like Runway, Pika, Neural Frames and Sora who are leaving no stone unturned to revolutionize animation. However, they are far from being capable of producing the quality and creativity that a skilled animator brings to the table.
That’s especially true for branded content, where everything has to be tailored according to the unique brand image. In this article, we will try to explore the current trend of AI content creation, its effects on your brand, and whether it’s the best path to tread as an emerging business.
Keep reading to find out!
Why AI Generators Are Not Suitable for Brand Production (Currently)
No Innovation, Mediocre Content
The best definition of AI in the creative context would be that of a remix artist. It purely relies on twisting and turning the already existing content on the internet without generating anything new and original. And to be honest, this content is mediocre at best, with no creative spark that an actual human generates with imaginative ideas. It’s often very recognizable that it is made with AI and copies of it become available quickly on Youtube. Something a brand never wants!
If you’re a brand contemplating using AI-generated content in your campaigns, it could be quite a risk. Attention is the only thing that a brand cashes on in marketing. With AI, you don’t just lose that attention; you lose your authority as well. In other words, you’ll just remain a mediocre brand with mediocre content, in the vast sea of mediocrity, with no personality that distinguishes you from your competitors.
Defects and flaws
Have you ever come across an AI video on the internet where a character has 5 fingers in one frame and 4 or 6 in another? Well, that’s the problem with AI-generated animation. It’s full of funny glitches, odd transitions, and visual inconsistencies.
Since branded content requires customized animation with proper attention to detail, every minor aspect of the video has to be pitch perfect and entirely aligned with your brand image. And given the limited capabilities of AI, it cannot be trusted with such a delicate task.
Remember, building a positive brand image is hard!
In an already saturated market where every competitor is on the run to put you down, you cannot afford churning out poor quality content in front of your audience. It can negatively impact the audience’s perception of your brand, ultimately affecting your position in the market.
Difficulty in Directing and Replicating Objects and Characters
Building on the previous point, the way you visually present yourself to the online world becomes your brand identity. It could be a particular color theme, a special style of animation, or even unique characters that leave a mark on the people’s minds. It’s something that helps the audience identify your content without even trying.
However, to achieve that level of brand awareness, it’s essential to keep that special style, color theme, or characters consistent in every frame, every scene, and every video. And that’s only possible with skilled human hands.
For the time being, AI tools struggle a lot in keeping the objects, characters, and color appearance consistent across different scenes. It cannot replicate the same image over and over in different scenes with exact accuracy.
While this affects the quality of your branded animation video, it could also negatively impact your visual identity—something that requires complete control over the content quality to ensure visual uniformity.
Challenges in Directing the Cameras
Whether it’s films, commercial, technical, or branded content, camera angles play a huge role in maintaining the flow of the visuals, story, and overall narrative. It takes a lot of creativity and technical finesse to master which angle, movement, and transition to use to capture the details and emotions that the scene is trying to evoke.
For example, in traditional animation, the angels keep changing according to narrative needs, pacing, and mood. If you ever watched an animation or even a live-action movie, you might have noticed the camera getting closer to create intimacy or wider to build scale.
AI lacks this contextual understanding. As a result, it often fails to alter the angles according to the situation to maintain the much-needed logical coherence. This results in poor frames and awkward transitions. Thus, the scenes lack emotional depth, with visual inconsistencies
Simply put, while AI can automate the generation of content, it lacks the creative finesse and narrative sensitivity of a human mind, resulting in scenes that feel flat, with no emotional impact.
Lack of project files, limiting revisions
Generative AI is currently quite decent at producing final output formats. However, there are no editable project files like those in traditional professional software like Blender, Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, etc. As a result, you don’t have the raw data of the project to revisit in order to tweak or revise the project.
This means, it’s impossible for you to make adjustments to the fine details like color, movements, and timings separately. So if you require a revision, you’ll have to regenerate a whole new version of the same project, which, in many cases, is never the same.
This takes away from you the flexibility to make changes to the video once it’s generated, significantly hindering the ability to revise in projects where going back-and-forth is absolutely necessary to make an excellent final product for the audience.
Eyeing AI Animation to Save Costs
Using AI to cut down on marketing costs seems like a tempting idea as a brand. However, it’s not always the best. If you are one of such brands, here are some things to keep in mind before using AI for your animations:
Saves money, costs reputation
You’re working in an attention economy where customer engagement and trust serve as the cornerstones of your brand’s growth. If your content isn’t high quality, it’s hard to capture people’s attention, and as a result, you lose valuable leads that could be your loyal customers.
The most tempting thing about AI content for brands is that it almost doesn’t cost anything to generate… except their reputation. That’s true! AI content is often low quality and fails to capture the attention of your target audience. This not only wastes your marketing budget but also harms your brand’s image.
Imagine watching an ad on Youtube that’s generated by AI! It looks cheap, it feels cheap, and it sounds cheap, ultimately tarnishing your brand image for thousands of people who could be your regular customers. You lose the trust of your audience ultimately, which dims the chances of your growth.
AI Isn’t Ready for Professional Video & Animation Production (Yet!)
If you use social media, we’re sure you must have heard cliche dialogues like “AI has completely revolutionized every industry,” etc. at least once. Such statements are especially made for the animation and content writing, two industries specifically targeted by AI.
At this moment, these statements are mere statements, and there’s a long way to go for AI to reach the quality and nuance of professional animation. Professional-grade videos are hard to make and require a level of detail that AI is currently not capable of achieving.
So instead of jumping directly on the AI bandwagon, think about what your business needs and whether AI has the capability to cater to them. Currently, AI is far away from creating industry-standard animations.
Copyright Issues and Duplicated Ideas
As you may have understood by now, AI content generators are trained models that just churn out, well, content. However, whether that content is copyright protected or not is where the ambiguity lies.
Right now, it’s sort of ‘wild, wild west’, and the copyright laws are yet to keep up with the pace at which AI is advancing. So no matter what you make with AI, it is not protected by the copyright laws, and anyone can use it without any legal complications whatsoever.
Another problem that arises as a result of this is content and idea duplication. Since everyone can make anything without taking the legal consequences into consideration, there’s a good chance that most of the content produced will be identical, either in visuals or ideas. This makes it significantly harder to stand out in the vast sea of sameness, and you won’t be able to differentiate in your products and messaging.
Besides, AI tools often copy ideas from original and copyrighted content available online. This is another problem to look out for, as it could put you in a complicated legal situation, posing a significant risk to your brand reputation.
Negative Perception: AI-Generated Videos Could Damage Brand Trust
Modern social media apps such as Meta (Facebook, Instagram) automatically flag AI content subject to the industry’s standard signals. These signals indicate whether the content is created or edited using third party AI tools, or Meta’s own AI tools.
If detected, they will automatically add an “AI info” label to the post, letting the users know where it’s coming from. Other major video content creation platforms such as Tiktok are doing the same.
While flagged content isn’t banned by any platform, it does hurt your credibility in front of your target audience. It presents you as a brand that’s already trying to cut corners without any quality control. What’s the guarantee you will not do the same with your product or service?
Remember, your content is your first introduction to your clients and consumers. In a highly competitive market where quality is the only thing that gives you an edge, churning out budget AI content is not always a good idea.
Final Words
While AI is one of the greatest technological leaps forward in the current times, it’s important to know that it’s still in its developmental stage. There are a lot of improvements to be made before it can be used as an alternative to humans when it comes to content generation.
AI at this point remains clumsy, inaccurate, and full of defects, and cannot be trusted to generate human-level animations at this point. It lacks the attention to detail that human animators possess, and can hardly create any impact in the competitive market of today.
Will it remain the same in future as well? Probably not. In fact, we are just a few years away until this technology matures. But until then, toying around with it to make animation content for your brand just to cut costs could just harm your reputation at most, with no positive outcome whatsoever.