I caught an interview the other day with Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two, where he said something the AI conversation seems determined to ignore: making content is not the same as creating a hit.
That line stopped me.
I've been building an AI tool for short-form video creators for over a year now, and I work as a director on the other side of that equation. Both seats give me the same view. Whether you're trying to make a viral video, a campaign, or a film, you still need the same three things you always needed. Vision. Originality. Taste.
The distinction that matters
Zelnick framed AI pretty plainly. Big data, enormous processing power, and language models mushed together. Useful, but limited in a specific way. Data, by nature, is backward looking. It can only tell you what already worked. Creativity is the opposite. It's forward looking. It anticipates what people want before they know they want it.
That distinction matters more than it sounds.
Cloning doesn't sell
It's easy to clone something. Cloning is what AI is built to do. But cloning doesn't sell. There is a flood of content right now that is technically competent and completely forgettable. You can feel it when you scroll. The hook is fine, the cuts are fine, the captions are fine, and you have no reason to care.
Cloning is what AI is built to do. But cloning doesn't sell.
AI can absolutely help you move faster. It can automate the boring stuff, kill the blank page, and surface patterns you might have missed. What it cannot do is anticipate the next trend or see what people want before the data does. By the time something shows up in the training set, the original move has already been made by someone who wasn't waiting on permission.
Filmmaking taught me this
When you're making a film, you may have the whole movie in your head before you ever step on set, but you cannot make it alone. It takes a village. The DP brings their eye. The actors bring choices you didn't write. The production designer notices a wall texture that changes the entire tone of a scene. Every collaborator adds their own brush stroke, and the spontaneity of that process is where the unexpected things happen. The moments people remember.
Zelnick's argument lands here too. Anything driven purely by data, by its nature, cannot be unexpected. And the unexpected is what travels. It's why a tiny indie film outperforms a tentpole sometimes. It's why a kid with a phone outperforms a brand with a budget.
Anyone can copy a film, a visual style, a voice. What separates humans from machines is the willingness to make a choice the data would never suggest. AI is not going to think for you. It is not going to take a stand for you. It is not going to risk anything for you.
The gap is closing on the other side
That said, I will give AI credit for one real thing. It is closing the gap between what you can visualize and what you can actually make.
Anyone who has been on set knows the feeling. You wrap a shoot and you hit maybe 75% of what was in your head. The performance landed slightly off. It rained when you needed sun. The art direction was rough and you knew you couldn't just fix it in post. AI has its own version of that gap, of course. The output is nothing like the prompt, and eighty-five prompts later you're still not there. But the trend line is real. The distance between vision and execution is shrinking on both sides.
Where ScriptHooks lands
That's the space my team is trying to live in with ScriptHooks. The tool can write your script. It can suggest your b-roll. It can grade your own work and tell you what to fix. What it cannot do, and what we don't want it to do, is replace the thing that makes your content yours. Your fingerprint. Your taste. Your point of view. The reason anyone followed you in the first place.
We're a tool. We help you move faster, eliminate blank page syndrome, and find the gaps in what you're putting out. You still bring the brand, the IP, the voice. That part isn't outsourceable, and the people who try to outsource it are the ones who will get drowned out fastest.
Use the tools. Move faster. But keep the vision yours.
Try it on something you're working on
ScriptHooks writes scripts, grades drafts, and gives you a structural read on what you've made. The decisions stay yours.
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- Wes
Founder, ScriptHooks