The video teams winning with AI right now

From the Arsenal: Humans hallucinate better than AI.

Story Of The Day: While I was in Shanghai my cousin introduced me to two founders running a production company there.

Bob comes from a heavy VFX and technical production background.
Mary handles producing, client management, and pre-production.

For the next two hours, almost the entire conversation revolved around AI.

What tools they were using.
What actually worked.
What was overhyped.
How much faster technical execution was becoming.

Bob started listing every tool he was testing.

ChatGPT.
Gemini.
Higgsfield.
Seedance.
VPNs to bypass Chinese firewalls.
Waiting in queues.
Burning tokens nonstop.

What stood out to me wasn’t the tools themselves.
It was how his role inside the production process was changing.

Years ago, getting the exact motion graphic or visual effect you wanted meant hours...
inside technical software like After Effects or Blender.

Now?

It was spinning a slot machine.

Prompt.
Generate.
Adjust.
Prompt again.
Generate again.

Eventually something gets close enough.

Then his role shifts from typing to taste and quality control.

That alone was interesting.

But Mary took the conversation somewhere deeper.

She said AI is becoming incredibly useful for
brainstorming, scripts, timelines, communication, and pre-production support.

But when it comes to true creative breakthroughs, it still feels constrained.

Because great writers and directors don’t think linearly.

They make strange connections.
They pull from emotion.
Memory.
Mood.
Random observations.
Past experiences.
Mistakes.

They jump sideways outside the box.

That was really the entire difference.

AI thrives when there is clear input and logic.

Humans thrives in hallucinations and chaos.

And maybe that’s what still separates great video teams from AI-generated work.

Takeaways: The more technical execution gets automated, the more valuable that human layer becomes.

How to Apply It Today:

1. Use AI To Remove Friction: Reinvest that time into taste and judgment.
2. Build A Team With Strong Taste: As AI lowers the barrier for execution, technical capability becomes less rare.
3. Protect Nonlinear Thinking: Not every valuable idea comes from structured logic. Originality often comes from emotion, chaos, mistakes, and unexpected connections.

Pro tip: If your entire workflow becomes optimized purely for speed and efficiency, you may accidentally remove the exact conditions where originality happens.

As promised: dialing in your video workflows 1% at a time.

Want help launching, scaling and upgrading video operating systems?
That’s what we do inside DenimStitch.

AI is a tool,
-David