The human factor: How the industry is getting real

Reality has taken a battering in recent years. Is it a hallucination of the senses, as some scientists suggest, shaped by how we conceive it? Or are humans the malleable ones, bending and breaking in the grip of realities we cannot control? We can’t escape it, but we can’t define it either. But we know when we see it.

Like the workings of our own minds, reality is a mystery. Philosophers of mind have batted about ideas on the nature of reality since the get-go, and in the past few years, its final curtain appears to have fallen in the guise of generative AI, with its promise to blur the real and synthetic until we cannot tell one from the other.

At Cannes, the focus was on the importance of the ‘zag’ – when the world goes digital, go analogue; in the face of the virtual, be real.

Since then, across the creative industries, AI tools and studios have popped up like mushrooms overnight, with LLM machinery speeding up and reducing the costs of processes that once ate up time, budgets and workforces. 

Above: The amusing behind-the-scenes film for Apple’s 2025 Christmas spot is part of a growing trend for content emphasising the human made ‘reality’ of the piece.

The reality is that AI tools are embedded in most processes now, but that AI outputs are not the ‘great replacement’ they were predicted to be. A lot of us humans are sceptical of AI’s synthetic realities. A recent Gallup poll shows Gen Z anxiety around its existence has risen steeply since last year, while at Cannes, the focus was pulled on the human-made, on the importance of  the zag – when the world goes digital, go analogue; in the face of the virtual, be real.

Craft, the handmade, the magic of working in-camera, of making things from scratch – these are trends that were lauded at Cannes, and yet AI is not going back into any box anytime soon.

“Cannes rewarded human craft,” says Andrew Tindall, Chief Growth Officer at creative effectiveness platform System1, which investigated Cannes winners since 2010 and found that the strongest consumer response went to works rooted in craft, humour and storytelling. In short, old-fashioned techniques that come to human creatives naturally.

Above: Anthropic’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning brace of ads for Claude was notable for live-action content embodying and satirising AI, while promoting an ad-free AI tool.

“From Apple's Critter Carol and Intermarché's Unloved to Vaseline's Love Hurts, the standout winners were rich in emotion, storytelling and distinctive execution,” say Tindall. “Younger audiences, in particular, quickly spot AI and tend to respond less positively. Even AI brands know this. The best campaigns use real people, humour and relatable moments to build emotional connection. AI is a powerful creative tool, not a creative strategy. It lowers barriers, accelerates production and opens new possibilities, but it still relies on human judgement, distinctive brand assets and strong creative direction. The brands winning with AI aren't replacing creativity. They're using AI to amplify it.”

The worry is that as we become reliant on AI tools, they start to replace a skillset, and then replace our imagination.

Case in point: Mother’s hilarious Film Lions Grand Prix-winning A Time and a Place Super Bowl spots for Anthropic’s Claude AI, helmed by Biscuit’s Jeff Low. The 60-second How do I Communicate with my Mom? aired before kick-off, with a 30-second in-game spot, Can I Get a Six Pack Quickly? together garnering 120 million views. Claude had a hand in the back end – collating research, sharpening briefs, navigating complex production schedules – while the front end of concept, direction, scripts, performances, and production were all human-driven. 

Above: The second of the two witty Claude AI spots in which robotic humans with android smiles pillory the artificial idiocy of artificial intelligence.

De’Longhi’s Tiny Coffee shops, made with LOLA Madrid and master model maker Simon Weisse, won a Grand Prix for Industry Craft. Weisse and the team worked from his Berlin studio, making five miniature coffee shops using traditional techniques, with a De’Longhi machine nestled in the facade of each one. 

Together they marry the intense, immersive coffee experience De’Longhi offers with the intense, immersive craft of LOLA’s spots. “Collaborating with Simon allowed us to elevate that idea through true craftsmanship,” says LOLA’s ECD Tomás Ostiglia, “bringing a level of detail and artistry that mirrors the care people expect from their favourite cafés.” 

Film and advertising have always toyed with reality.

This push and pull between human representations of reality through craft and digital augmentation is played out in a striking new series of short films, Humancentric from Miketeevee that asks a simple question: if everyone has access to the same AI tools, what is it that differentiates the final outcomes? 

To find out, an original scene was written by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Efthimis Filippou (The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Kinds of Kindness) and sent to eight art directors, 3D artists, sound designers, VFX specialists and more. Same script. Same dialogue. Same starting point. Eight entirely different works. 

Ultimately, we might not care if it is real or not, but we do care if it is true.

For Creative Director Dave Bell, the outcomes were fascinating and revealing. “We wanted to explore the possibilities but also the limitations of AI,” he says, “and it was the fact they were so radically different from each other that stood out. The artists generally used the same tools, but mixed them up in different ways and arrived at very different places. They treated the challenge as a creative puzzle, rather than a technical one. But for all of them AI was never the starting point. Rather, it helped, as David Szauder [one of the participating artists] says, ‘to give form to something that had already been imagined internally’.”

Above: This year’s Cannes Industry Craft jury praised the “great ideas and beautiful stories” that won DeLonghi Tiny Coffee Shop the Grand Prix.

“The tools haven’t flattened creativity, in this instance,” adds Bell. “The worry is that as we become reliant on AI tools, they start to replace a skillset, and then replace our imagination. These films, we hope, suggest otherwise: AI can help us go places we might not have been able to previously.”

There is, he suggests, no hard border between machine learning and human intuition. AI operates through patterns, but it’s humans that make connections, and it is those new, undiscovered connections that differentiates human creativity from AI’s synthetic amalgams. 

But is the future a hybrid mix of the two? Bell is unsure. “Hybrid suggests equal billing, and the great fear is that we abdicate control to AI. Humancentric argues the opposite. AI is directed, wrangled, interrupted and overruled by humans who add emotions, memories and lived experiences to the process.”

Above and main image: Patternson, directed by Doopiidoo, was one of the Humancentric series of films in which one script by Efthimis Filippou was interpreted eight different ways.

When it comes to the question of our changing sense of reality fuelled by the unreal engines of AI, the fundamental issue is trust. “Film and advertising have always toyed with reality,” says Bell. “The problem is when manipulation goes too far. Advertising has often been treated with scepticism – are they trying to fool us? AI makes it more so: is this AI trying to trick me? Ultimately, we might not care if it is real or not, but we do care if it is true.”

William Grave heads up the Human Made Mark project, which posits that “with generative AI, the human village that comes together to create a film is under threat like never before”. It draws its name from some of the earliest known human-made marks, the 29,000 year-old Pech Merle cave paintings. It gives the studios and filmmakers of today a way to certify and celebrate the fact their production uses human artists behind the camera and in front of it. 

The human connection shared between artists on set can’t be mass produced.

“What makes film unique is that it has always been a collaborative artform, with many artists coming together to create something new, something that moves us and even changes us,” says Grave. “This was true when A Trip to the Moon was made in 1902, and true when a film like The Odyssey is made today. Every artist leaves their mark. Every village is more than the sum of its parts. The creative friction which creates brilliance can’t be programmed. The human connection shared between artists on set, which almost by osmosis is experienced by the audience when they watch a great performance, can’t be mass produced. That’s what we are here to protect.”

Fatigue at the AI-driven ‘tsunami of the mediocre’ is real.

He offers up a thought experiment that encapsulates our human thirst for the real, shared experience of seeing remarkable things made by people. Imagine that Sony Bravia's Balls was made today, he says, with AI. Would it have as much impact? Of course not. “Part of the poetry of the original film is that there was subconsciously an awareness from the audience that, wow, they actually did this for real. That’s nuts. That’s cool. There was a mad group of human beings who came together and created something we have never seen before in a real street in San Francisco.” 

Above: Much of the appeal of Sony Bravia’s legendary spot Balls was the knowledge that the stunt was done for real.

We are, he adds, “desperate more than ever for the feeling of connection. That’s why we believe the greatest opportunity in the AI era might not be AI, but standing out by being human.” The Human Made Mark has already taken off after being profiled by Variety, and supported by the likes of Guillermo del Toro, and ‘human made’ was among the top 10 trending terms at the end of the Cannes Lions. Fatigue at the AI-driven ‘tsunami of the mediocre’ is real.

But as Bianca Redgrave, MD at Studio Private, points out, the reality of how we perceive reality onscreen is that it is hybrid, and has been for a while. Studio Private handles post work in fashion and luxury, and navigates that space between traditional craftsmanship and cutting-edge innovation. “We’re in the business of things really looking good,” she says, “and where we land is hybrid on everything.” Which means CG and AI working together, with the latter doing a lot of the grunt work, and humans controlling the CG.

With CG, often we're putting detail in, to make it more real because it's got this weird sexless, human-less quality to it.

Fashion and luxury, she says, are less about concept and more about an aesthetic and a feeling. You have to be a human to capture that feeling, but a hybrid of AI tools and CG can help fix it. “We have a good understanding of what happens on set and what a high-end photographic image looks like when it's been shot,” she says. 

Redgrave elaborates: “What's interesting is that often, with retouching, you're taking detail out, you're smoothing, you're perfecting, you're making it a bit less real. And then with CG, often we're putting detail in, to make it more real because it's got this weird sexless, human-less quality to it. You can create grain quite nicely in CG and then bring it into the image. So you've got photography, you've got AI, and you've got post-production bringing it all together.”

Produced by Miketeevee, the Humancentric octet of films, including The Hunter and The Ladder (above), are evidence of homo sapiens working with AI to let the ideas fly.

For Tony Roberts, cofounder of Common People and its AI/VFX arm Future Crea+ives, “it's the human element that is the driving force, and I think everybody's kind of come around to that conclusion. We’re doing an awful lot of AI work and we're ramping up the studio, but it's still all driven by people and human creativity and human decisions.”

He points to their recent Rolls Royce spot Infinite Potential, shot at its gargantuan civil aerospace headquarters in Derby, as an example of hybrid realism that compels rather than repels. “If you can shoot it, shoot it,” he says. “Nothing’s ever as good as the real thing. It was all filmed on site, and there were lots of restrictions about what we could do there, but everything is in camera, with a layer of VFX, and the amount of craft that went into it was phenomenal. You don’t want people to sit down and go, I wonder what AI platform they’ve done that in?” he adds. “Because if they’re having that conversation, they’re not talking about the creativity and the message.”

Above: Common People Studio’s hybrid spot for Rolls Royce was filmed in camera with a ‘layer of VFX’. 

While AI tools can create convincing enough fakes, it is a technology that is also being used to confront and change perceptions in the real world. Enter global medical technology company Ottobock with its new open-source library of visual assets that AI systems can use to learn what an accurate representation of prosthetic users actually looks like.

However much tech companies say something is ‘inevitable’, the future hasn’t been written yet.

“We wanted to address a clear representation gap in AI-generated imagery around disability,” says Ottobock's Chief Experience Officer Martin Böhm, “especially for people with limb loss or limb difference. What we saw early on was that the issue was not just aesthetic – it was structural. We wanted to work with people with limb differences directly, because authenticity and trust only come when people can help shape how they are represented. We hope it also encourages other industries, brands and technology partners to think more carefully about inclusion in AI. The technology has enormous potential, but only if it reflects the diversity of the world more accurately.”

Human hunger for experience and identification with realness is more pronounced than ever.

Reality has many faces, a multitude of facets, and while AI beds itself into creative studios worldwide, the reality is that the human hunger for experience and identification with realness is more pronounced than ever when set against widespread rejection of “AI slop” in the “age of beige”. The Unreal Engine may be the industry’s most powerful rendering tool, but it’s the realness of emotional response and connection as much as the worlds created that is key to securing audience trust.