Pre-Vis and the AI Revolution: Supercharging Creativity Without Losing the Soul

The debate is raging, louder than ever: Can AI make art? Can it be truly creative, or is it just a machine, a mindless mimicry of what humans already do? Both sides dig in, convinced they hold the answer. But like most things in the world of creativity, the truth isn’t black and white. It’s a mess of gray areas, perspective, and context. And here’s the thing—both sides might be right, depending on how you look at it.

Let’s start with the skeptics. Those who rail against AI argue that it can’t feel, it can’t think, it can’t experience the world like we do. And they're right. They see AI’s heavy-handed use in creating things like generic horror movie scripts or songs that sound eerily like Drake. They see soulless, non-creative machines churning out finished products devoid of life. To them, that’s terrifying. After all, art, in its truest form, comes from the human soul. It’s a reaction to the world, a reflection of life, not just an algorithm.

But what if we’re missing the bigger picture? What if the real power of AI lies not in replacing human creativity but in supercharging it? That’s where I stand. I don’t see AI as the death of art; I see it as a powerful tool—a creative amplifier. AI, when used right, can take our ideas and make them bigger, bolder, more detailed than ever before. The trick is knowing how to wield that power.

Here’s where Pre-Vis (Pre-Visualization) comes into play. In this new world of AI-powered creativity, Pre-Vis is going to be the deciding factor in who thrives and who doesn’t. Think of it like a roadmap for creativity, a way to lay down the bones of a project before it fully comes to life. It’s not about asking AI to write the final script for your movie or produce a song. It’s about using AI to do the heavy lifting—the story beats, the rough sketches, the outlines. It’s about creating a foundation on which human creativity can flourish.

AI can’t give you the soul of a story, but it can help you map out the structure. You can feed it beats, and from those beats, build scenes. From scenes, you build a plot. From a plot, you build a script. It’s a step-by-step process, layering human insight and AI’s brute-force capability together. The soul, the life of the project? That comes from the creator—the human who adds the emotion, the texture, the voice. It’s the artist’s soul that gives the final product meaning. But the AI? The AI provides the scaffolding, the infinite input, and the precision that supercharges the creative process.

Think of AI as an infinite assistant, one that never tires, never gets bored, never complains. You can ask it to generate hundreds of versions of a scene, refine the action beats, rework a storyboard in ways that would take humans days to do. It provides the muscle so that you, the artist, can focus on the soul. The shooting schedule, the lighting setups, the camera moves—all the technical aspects can be handled with ruthless efficiency, freeing up your creative energy for the real work.

But there’s a danger here, and it’s not what most people think. It’s not that AI is going to replace artists. The real danger is that we’ll start using it to churn out soulless work on autopilot. It’s easy to see a future where AI dominates the creative process because it’s just so damn good at it. AI can create perfectly structured scripts, generate flawless scenes, and render stunning images, but without a human at the helm, all that perfection lacks depth. No soul, no experience, no perspective.

That’s where the magic lies. The real power of AI isn’t in replacing the artist; it’s in empowering them. But to do that, we need to approach AI with the right mindset. We can’t rely on it to be creative for us. Instead, we need to use it as a tool to refine, build, and elevate our work. This means approaching every project as a process of incremental refinement—feeding AI the right inputs, layering in human experience, and shaping the final product with the unique vision only a human can provide.

The creative process is not about asking AI to do everything for you. It’s about collaborating with the machine in ways that enhance human creativity. AI gives us the ability to work faster, smarter, and more efficiently, but it’s up to us to make sure we don’t lose sight of what really matters: the human element. We need to inject our soul, our voice, our perspective into every piece of art we create, even as AI takes on more and more of the technical burden.

At the end of the day, AI tools are just that—tools. They’re the most advanced, most efficient production and design assistants ever created. But they’re not human. They don’t know what it’s like to experience loss, joy, love, or fear. They can’t replicate the messy, beautiful chaos of human life. And that’s why we need to embrace AI not as a replacement for creativity, but as a superpower for creators.

The challenge isn’t in figuring out how to use AI; it’s in figuring out how to inject our soul into the process. How do we keep our work human in a world where machines can do so much? My answer: Pre-Vis and communication. Break every project into its most basic elements. Use AI to handle the technical details, but never let it take over the soul of your work. That’s your job as the creator—to bring the soul. And when you do, AI will supercharge your creativity in ways you never thought possible.