AI is not your muse. It's a department.
Treat it like any hire: give it a clear brief, a deadline, and a lane. Use it for repetitive work—transcription, shot-variant generation, storyboard frames, call sheets, metadata cleanup, rough-cut suggestions, continuity checks, alternate copy, pre-vis. Let it be the assistant who never sleeps so you can be the director who does.
But don't hand it authorship. A machine that can generate anything will always struggle to choose the one thing worth believing. Choice requires taste. Taste requires risk. Risk requires a human spine.
Here's where people get it wrong: they use AI to avoid decisions, then call the result "efficient." Efficiency is not art. Efficiency is logistics. Art is the part where you decide what you're willing to be judged for.
Man Ray would have loved AI—not as a replacement for imagination, but as a new darkroom trick, a new way to bend reality until it confesses something strange. That's the right relationship: AI as experimentation, as iteration, as acceleration. Not as a substitute for point of view.
If you're building an AI-augmented production workflow, build it like a pipeline with guardrails: what AI can touch, what it cannot touch, what requires human approval, what must remain "real." Protect your faces. Protect your lighting decisions. Protect the emotional logic of the scene. Let AI remove friction, not meaning.
Hire it. Don't marry it. Marriage is what you do when you want someone else to make decisions for you. You don't want that. Not if you care about your work.