Hey friends,
I was on a call with a fellow creative the other day, and he told me something that put a knot in my stomach...
He'd been talking to a business owner about helping them with some video, and the guy said something that made him stop. "Why pay a videographer two grand when a twenty-dollar AI tool can spit out something that'll be good enough by Friday?"
It wasn't said in a mean way. It was just a thought on his mind that came out naturally, the way people say things that feel obvious to them.
And when he told me this, I felt the exact fear I reckon you've felt too. The quiet one that goes: is the thing I've spent years getting good at about to be worth nothing?
So I sat with it for a day. And here's where I landed (and I believe it more now than I ever have).
First, let me say the thing most people in this space won't. AI can make beautiful work. A gorgeous sunset. A perfect sweeping gimbal shot. A colour grade you'd swear a colourist spent a day on. I'm not going to pretend it can't. Pretending these tools are rubbish is how you get blindsided.
But here's what it can't do, and never will. It can only look backwards. Every model is trained on what we've already made, our films, our photos, our mistakes, our breakthroughs. It's the most powerful mirror ever built, but it's still a mirror. It can remix the past in dazzling ways, but it can't create original ideas. It can't bring to life an idea that has never existed, because the idea that has never existed isn't in the data.
Human creativity is the thing you can't quite put your finger on. It's the spontaneous moment that somehow just comes to you. The choice that shouldn't work and somehow does. The spark that comes from being a person, alive in a specific moment, feeling something, and reaching for a way to say it. No machine has that. And that's our moat.
So here's the part I'm actually excited about. As our feeds slowly fill up with more and more of the same polished, generated work, something is going to happen to people. They're going to get hungry for the opposite. For things with rough edges. For what's real. For work that could only have come from one specific human who saw the world one specific way. The more artificial slop there is, the more precious the genuine, human-made things become.
Which means the move isn't to compete with the machine on volume, or speed, or polish. You'll lose. The move is to run harder in the other direction. To be more honest, more unique, and more you than you've ever let yourself be before. Your weird obsessions. Your particular eye. The stories only you would think to tell. This used to feel like a risk, but it's about to be the entire advantage we have.
So yes, a business can generate a video. But it can't generate raw human emotion, the thing people are going to seek out more and more as time goes on. It can't sit with someone's story long enough to find the bit that matters and build a whole film around it. Real stories, real people, real impact is what's really going to matter as we move forward.
So if the flood of the artificial is freaking you out, let me offer you a strategy to push back against the takeover: lean into you. Be unapologetically yourself, and let that translate through whatever project, video, or idea you're working on.
From now on, use this as your filter when you're deciding what to make. I promise it'll help you bring to life ideas that don't just perform well, but feel true to who you are and what you stand for as a creative.
🎧 WHAT I'M LISTENING TO & WATCHING
I'm a sucker for survival/adventurous videos. To me, there's something about spending time in nature and going back to the roots that invokes a sense of wonder in me. Which is why, when I recently came across this video about a man who spent 300 days living on an island by himself, I was instantly intrigued.
My real take away from watching this though wasn't necessarily about what it took to survive out there, but more so how the journey changed him. As a documentary filmmaker and storyteller, I'll always be interested in how certain scenarios and things in our life can change us... and I think this was a great example of that. Definitely a good watch if this is something you're into and have a spare fifty minutes!
💭 AN IDEA I'M PONDERING
The more the world learns to automate, the more your unique point of view becomes the actual product. Taste used to be a nice-to-have. It's about to be the job.
🎬 ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
Before your next project, whether it be a video, a photo, an edit, anything: write down one choice no one else would make, but feels right to you. A song that shouldn't fit. An angle no one shoots. An opening that breaks the rule. Then commit to it, even if it scares you a little.
If you're someone who wants to grow the creative taste and voice that makes your work impossible to replace, I'm privately opening a handful of spots to Northstar... a small cohort where I teach exactly that. Inside you'll learn how to find what's unmistakably yours, sharpen your eye, and make the kind of work people seek out because only you could have made it.
It's not for everyone, and that's the point. But if reading this felt like it was describing where you're trying to go, this is the room for it.
Reply with the word NORTHSTAR and I'll send you the details.
Chat soon,
Joel