When it comes to services and products of any kind, you have the Good, Fast, and Cheap triangle.

The theory is that you can only have 2 of the three, and to get those two, you have to sacrifice the third.

Good and Cheap? Not Fast

Fast and Cheap? Not good

Good and Fast? Not Cheap

When companies like Fiverr hit the marketplace, there was a rapid decline in quality and they gave the illusion that they could overcome the triangle.

They never came out and said it, but that was what was behind the facade. 

You can get good, fast, and cheap!

Except you couldn’t. After the first round of design, it would take forever for revisions or, the file quality was subpar (we’ve had to rebuild several Fiverr-generated logos because the file quality was terrible, even for video).

Looking for the Easy Way

It seems to have become human nature to look for the path of least resistance, especially when starting or running a business.

No one has any patience anymore. Our culture has shifted so hard to instant gratification that it seems that cutting corners is the only way to go. 

What’s worse? Cutting corners has become acceptable. The results? Fast and Cheap.

Now don’t get me wrong, fast and cheap, sometimes is the way to go. 

Why is this Important?

Recently, we’ve seen a lot of noise about marketing agencies leaning into generative AI to create video advertisements.

First off, they don’t look good. Will they? Eventually. But at what cost?

I’m not philosophical enough to really have any idea what the long-term effects will be when they ripple out, but, what I can say is that it’s not good.

Generative AI is theft

AI cannot think for itself. Maybe some day it will and when that happens, I hope none of you are named John Connor.

For right now, it is software that is learning from existing material and regurgitating it. 

Anyone who took any English classes from middle school on has heard the term plagiarism. 

That is what generative AI is. It takes things others have created and rips it off.

There was a period of time where ChatGPT would take an image and you could tell it to make it look like Studio Ghibli. 

Was it fun? Sure, but then people started selling that as “art”.

Any way you cut it, it’s wrong. 

As humans, we can, and do, take inspiration from our influences. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s how we’re wired. It’s how we learn. 

However, entering a prompt and generating something that you could not or would not generate yourself is not inspiration. It’s a machine stealing from someone else.

Efficiency vs Laziness

Efficiency

Now I would be remiss, if not hypocritical, if I did not discuss how we, Hamil Bros Studios, use AI. 

It absolutely comes in handy. We use it to help us be more efficient.

There are tools we use for cleaning up footage (our own original footage) that was shot in less-than-ideal scenarios, or to slow footage down that needed to be slow motion, or to scale footage up to a larger resolution. 

We will also use AI to minimize time spent on really tedious tasks like rotoscoping (if you’re into the visual effects world).

Lately, I’ve taken to creating scripts to accomplish tasks at the push of a button. Is that not stealing?

I wouldn’t say so. If the AI is taking known scripting languages and information and using it the same as anyone else would to make the same thing, then it’s not really the same thing as content generation. Much like how a calculator is used for math.

The information being used to create the scripts was developed to be used to create scripts. 

This has saved us hours of time and helps eliminate errors.

Laziness

AI generated content is something else entirely.

AI does not take materials that were designed for regeneration. It takes materials that were, for the most part, intended to be original works of art and intellectual property and rips it off.

For some people, it’s just something fun to do privately. 

I have, myself, generated some things that I thought were funny for the sake of a joke because I cannot draw and I’m not a graphic designer or an artist of those types of media.

I see that as not much different than sitting down with my guitar and playing songs I’ve learned over the years.

I’m not taking credit for them. 

*Side note: I’m not going to bash on cover bands for getting paid to play cover songs. Again, that’s not theft. The artists who wrote those songs are getting paid royalties for the covers to be played. There are licensing agreements that get put into place so that artists still get paid for the work, even when someone else performs them.*

Where this really starts to grind my gears is that we have agencies, from international to local, encouraging people to start hiring them for generative AI work. 

The larger agencies are looking for ways to grow their bottom line. The local agencies, from what we’ve seen, just can’t deliver quality and this looks like a good shortcut when it’s simply intellectually dishonest. 

If you can’t deliver what you are selling to your clients, then you should rethink your strategy.

Hamil Bros Studios has to do this all the time in video production (as do many video production companies).

If we sell a job based on things that we don’t currently do in-house, we sub-contract it out. 

Voice actors, large scale 3D animation, aerial footage… We hire out all of those positions.

When we did the Champion Xpress ad campaign in February of 2024, we couldn’t handle something of that scale all by ourselves, so we hired in the people to get the job done and we got it all done right.

We walk away from nearly every job proud of what we’ve accomplished. 

Hiring someone to use AI generated content to advertise your business is going to fall short. There’s no pride in work and nothing was actually accomplished.

Removing the Human Element

It’s no secret that businesses, especially small businesses, are doing everything they can to turn a profit; otherwise, what is the point of even being in business?

We live in a society where if you work, you eat; you don’t work, you don’t eat.

There’s nothing wrong with making money and there’s nothing wrong with trying to protect your bottom line.

However the term “the bottom line” has a negative connotation for very good reasons. 

When the bottom line is your only focus, it will permeate your organization like a virus.

As a small business, Hamil Bros Studios, does our best to work with other small businesses. It helps everyone grow and, hopefully, it helps everyone do better than just surviving. 

When businesses start using AI generated content, they invest in an unhealthy economy. 

We spent our fair share of time at local networking events where everyone championed supporting local businesses and making small businesses thrive. Then they would turn around and, instead of hiring someone local to do a job, hire a virtual assistant, likely in a sweat shop in a 3rd world country, and pocket the difference.

We get emails all the time for groups that will do post production video work at a fraction of the cost simply because they have the volume of people who can do it and there are no regulations on how these people get paid or don’t get paid. 

Granted, there are plenty of products we buy that are made this way and we can’t exactly stop it, but I’m not going to send business to a place like that when I could send it somewhere locally within reason.

What Does This Mean for You?

You’ve spent years building your business. You may have tried some shortcuts and figured out the hard way that you end up paying for them or redoing the process later on.

I think we’re all guilty of that, especially when we’re doing everything ourselves. 

But, here you are now and now your marketing agency is trying to sell you on AI generated content. Why? To save you some money? Not likely. The ugly truth is that they likely can’t cut it. Their work is sub par and, instead of doing it the right way, they want to cheat.

The Cost to You

Is it cheaper? Maybe. At the time of writing this blog post, most agencies are wasting a ton of time creating and refining AI generated content with prompts, costing hundreds of work hours to do something that could have been done much quicker in real time.

However, what happens if someone steals your idea?

We’ve been making music, music videos, short films, and television commercials for years.

Every so often an image we’ve made, a song we’ve produced, or a commercial we’ve shot gets directly ripped off.

Over a decade ago, we had a bank recycle some footage and motion graphics that, per our agreement, they did not have rights to. Legally, they had to cease and desist its use.

A now closed jewelry store either had someone or allowed someone to rip one of our commercials for them off of youtube and “re-edit” it to something else. Again, legally, they were required to remove it from their social media accounts.

The US government doesn’t fool around with intellectual property rights.

However, let’s say that someone creates a commercial for you with generative AI and someone else decides they like it and they turn around, strip your branding off of the product and add their own.

What happens then?

Absolutely nothing.

Recently, the Supreme Court denied appeals to protect AI generated content under copyright law as the laws are based around works created by humans.

Your perceived property is fair game for anyone who wants to take it.

Granted there is nothing stopping someone from taking your idea and copying it and creating their own version, at least to a degree. If the products are identical, then you have a case… Unless it’s AI generated content. 

What Can You Do?

This is where, as a small business, Hamil Bros Studios is going to put out a call to end this nonsense.

We’re not fond of encouraging anyone to hire competitors, but, if it makes a difference in a marketing world that is slowly shifting to stolen intellectual property, that’s where we’ll go.

If you can’t afford to hire Hamil Bros Studios, talk to us anyway and we’ll see what we can do to work within your budget and if that doesn’t work find someone you can afford.

Patience is Key

Since starting business in 2011 (under G&H Media Productions), we have worked hard and built our business virtually debt free.

How did we do this? We took our time and grew as business came in. 

We stretched ourselves to the breaking point some times. If we needed equipment and we couldn’t afford it, sometimes we built it ourselves.

There was a time when we were operating a camera off of a surveyor’s tripod that was modified to hold a camera tripod head.

We built dollies out of plywood and inline skate wheels and used plumbing pipe, PVC pipe, and electrical conduit for the track.

We built camera jibs out of lumber and, again, plumbing pipe. We will never forget David at Home Depot in Lubbock for helping us cut threads and build our small jib in the aisle at the hardware store.

We used it on small projects and even on a local government contract for the Lubbock County Tax Assessors Office.

The point is: we’re not asking anyone to do anything we haven’t done ourselves. Use some patience and build things slowly, with honesty and integrity, and do them the right way.

Are we saying don’t use AI? Absolutely not. We use AI almost daily, but we don’t use it to create anything we sell.

In The End

At the end of the day, small business is hard enough with dishonest people and their dishonest business practices.

It is going to get harder when honest people are tricked into dishonest practices and the powers that be are pushing to give the illusion that it is indeed honest.

But, big voices and lobbying does not change honesty.

People throwing fits because they want to be considered artists when they have actually created nothing will not change that only humans make art, and making art takes time, skills, a lot of patience, and a lot of grit.

Being an artist is hard, y’all. We know, we do it professionally in video production and as a hobby with our band LABOR XII.

This little article may go nowhere, but, maybe if enough of us stand up and make noise for honesty and integrity, at least in the creative side of business, we may start to make waves and have a butterfly effect work in our favor instead of against us. 

You can start by demanding your marketing agency do things the right way. Not the stolen way. Not the dishonest way.

You can go fast and cheap while still being able to sleep at night.

All we’re asking is that you do what’s right.