There is a tendency to treat AI video as a single yes-or-no decision: either you are the sort of business that uses it or you are not. That framing gets people into trouble. The more useful question is narrower. For this particular clip, on this particular project, is generating it the right call, or would filming or licensing serve you better?
The three options are not interchangeable, and the cost of picking the wrong one is either wasted money or a result that quietly undersells you. It is worth knowing where each lands.
What AI video is actually good at
The newer tools take a written description or a still image and turn it into a short moving clip. That makes them strong for a specific band of work: atmosphere shots, simple product motion, stylised or abstract scenes, and quick concept pieces you want to see before committing to anything bigger.
A tool like seedance 2.0 lets you turn a line of text or an image into a short clip, which is often enough to fill the gaps a project tends to have, the few seconds of supporting footage between the parts that carry the message. For that kind of job it is fast, it is cheap, and it gives you something nobody else has.
The honest limits sit alongside that. Clips are short, and anything with fiddly motion, real faces, crowds or readable text still tends to come out wrong. If a job depends on those, AI is the weaker choice today.
Where a real shoot still earns its place
Anything that has to show your actual product, your actual premises, or a real person speaking to camera wants a real shoot. Customers can usually tell the difference, and trust is the thing you are spending when you fake it. Testimonials, founder pieces, regulated claims and your most important campaign work all belong here, because the cost of looking off is higher than the cost of the camera.
Where stock still makes sense
Stock has not gone away. When you need real footage of a place or event you cannot reach yourself, a recognisable landmark, or genuine archive material, a library is still the sensible route. The trade-off is that it is generic by design, so the more a clip needs to feel like yours, the less stock earns its keep.
Making the call
Run each clip through one question: does this need to be real, does it need to be specifically yours, or does it just need to be there? Real points you towards a shoot. Specifically yours, on a small budget, points you towards AI. Just needs to be there usually points to whichever is quickest.
Most projects end up using more than one method anyway. The teams getting good value are not the ones that picked a side and stuck to it. They are the ones that matched each clip to the method that suited it, and stopped paying full price for footage that a few minutes of generation would have covered.
