There were six of us on the call. A director in New York, one in Amsterdam, one in Germany, one in Canada. An agent in the UK, a production studio owner in Warsaw, and me, gathering their thoughts. Nobody had a particularly clear answer to anything. But that, actually, was the basic assumption from the start.
The idea behind Directory Community is simple: get a small group of people who know this industry well into a room (a virtual one, for now) and talk honestly. Not a panel, not a conference, not a LinkedIn post. A conversation. The kind that used to happen in corridors and on set but increasingly doesn’t happen anywhere, because the industry is moving so fast that nobody has time to stop and compare notes. These are our notes.
We are probably wrong to think of this moment in the industry as an AI story. It is an AI story, yes. But it is also an in-housing story (brands and agencies pulling production inside) and a story about how the economics of content creation have been quietly shifting for years. AI is the loudest conversation, but in-housing may be the most consequential one.
One of the stranger things about the current moment is the gap between what is praised about AI and what happens in reality. One director changed his role to a hybrid ninja because the market lacked someone who understands all the aspects of complexity of today’s workflow. Another described losing a pitch not because a client wanted to go all-AI, but because a client specifically refused. The reason was partly legal (what if a generated face happens to belong to a real person?) and partly something put into: it’s not what we stand for.
There are not a lot of voices openly describing the cons of AI content production: the difficulty of finishing anything, because theoretically you can always go back and change something; the endless multiplication of iterations with no natural endpoint; clients who have grown accustomed to requesting micro-corrections at every stage, while AI production actually requires some compromise to be held. The commercial workflow is not simpler. It is differently complex.
And yet, from conversations on the other side of the table: brands are quietly testing every model available, building pipelines, waiting for a moment when the legal risk has cleared enough to deploy.
The other aspect? We are living in a golden age of cheap AI: cheaper than anything before it and cheaper than anything that will follow. The implication is that the age has an end date. The cost efficiency argument that is driving so much of the current strategy is not a permanent condition. It is a window.
Assuming, for a moment, that the window stays open: what does AI actually do to the work?
It makes mediocre very easy. It makes the average look accomplished. In the sea of sameness it is already producing, the differentiator is the person operating it, and the people around them. Because making a commercial has always been a team sport, and that hasn’t changed. A proper AI production still needs a director with taste, a DOP who understands light, a stylist who reads the cultural temperature. Each of them brings something to the table that cannot be automated, because what they bring is not knowledge. It is sensibility, accumulated through work.
The ability to look at something and know, in ways that are difficult to explain and impossible to automate, that it is not good enough yet: that is the superpower of people who spent years on set solving creative challenges.
Gen Z, the generation who is already briefing us, has grown up watching algorithmic content consume everything and has started to turn away from it. They not only want vinyl records. They want the thing that was made by a person.
When beautiful is easy for everyone, you can finally see that beautiful was never enough. What was always required (the vision, the decision, the refusal to approve something until it is right) is now the part that stands out, because it is the part that the tool cannot do.
That is the best argument for the craft that this industry has ever had.
Everyone, right now, is figuring this out as they go. The standards don’t exist yet. The legal frameworks are still catching up. Most decisions are being made in the fog, with incomplete information and no clear direction.
We agreed to meet again next month.
Directory Community is a private, ongoing conversation for food and tabletop specialists.
