Not a rant, just a humble POV of a Brand and Motion Designer.
One of my friend's company went all in on AI for content few months back.
Last week he told me everyone there is fried and frustrated.
Not from the generation, that part is fast. They are fried from the revisions. A client wants to slow down one beat. Hold a moment a frame longer. Soften the bounce on a specific keyframe. None of it lands cleanly because the tool was never built for that kind of control.
Funny thing is, we were sold a different story. AI was supposed to revolutionize healthcare, research, the hard stuff. But treatment data and prescriptions were never really public, so the models got trained on what was easy to scrape instead. Code. Design. Motion. The work of the people it is now replacing.
So here we are. AI can give you something that looks like motion. It cannot give you motion you can actually direct.
You can prompt a decent product shot. You can fake a sim. But the moment a client says "the timing feels off at second 4," you are back to re-rolling the whole thing and hoping it stays close to what you had.
Where AI genuinely helps in my work: pulling moodboards together, drafting animation briefs, helping me write a Houdini wrangle when I am stuck on syntax. The timing, the weight, the feel of a shot still comes from a designer sitting at the timeline.
Generated motion is easy. Directable motion is the actual job
That said, Im still unsure where we are headed in next 5 years. I also feel that everything got adopted too early or we were pushed a very naive product.
Thoughts ?