The Shawl that AI would’ve gotten right

There was a time when a television commercial could be two minutes long. And people would actually watch it. We had Diwali commercials, Christmas commercials, Super Bowl commercials. Some were little films in themselves. They had characters, situations, humour, emotion and they all actually had something to say. We didn’t just see them, we remembered them.

Then attention became scarce. Technology changed. The 30-second film became the 15-second film, then the six-second bumper, then the reel. Then came AI. We suddenly discovered that we could create almost anything. But, something interesting happened too. Some of the most technically accomplished AI-generated films began to feel very empty. They may have been beautiful,  seamless and polished. But not human.

This is where the uncanny valley becomes an interesting metaphor for advertising. The closer something gets to looking and behaving like something human, without actually possessing the imperfections and instincts of human experience, the more unsettling the gap can become. Coca-Cola’s AI-driven Christmas work became one of the most visible examples of this conversation. Coca-Cola itself described its 2025 festive ad as combining AI with human creativity and said its ambition was to keep human creativity at the heart of the work. But consumers rejected the same.

Now, brands are discovering micro dramas. The industry is moving from making ads to making episodes. Brands are beginning to put themselves inside short, serialised stories as they feel consumers are more willing to watch a story than an interruption. A recent Mint article spoke about brands like Tata Motors and JK Super Cement and others experimenting with the format.

It makes perfect sense, Until it doesn’t as I suspect the next step will be predictable. The micro dramas will be made by AI, the characters, the locations, the dialogue and the variations will be generated by AI. The algorithm may even decide what story we should see next.  And then we’ll discover that we are bored again.

The problem was never the format. It was never television versus digital. It was never long-form versus short-form and it most certainly isn’t humans versus technology. The problem is what happens when technology starts replacing the very thing that made the work worth watching.

I was reminded of this recently while watching the latest Malayalam blockbuster, Bethlehem Kudumba Unit. The film has many wonderfully ordinary human moments.

There is one tiny moment that stayed with me. A character is sitting in a most filmed goa location. The scene is part of a Song. There is a shawl over his shoulder. The breeze keeps blowing it away, he puts it back, It flies again, he puts it back again. It happens a third time. Finally, rather than continuing to fight with it, he simply takes the shawl off and puts it on the other shoulder.

Nothing earth-shattering happens, There is no great dialogue, it has some wonderful gestures, no special effect, no twist in the plot. That is actually the point. A human being would do that. A writer may or may not even consciously write it, an actor may simply respond to the situation, A director may notice it as it happens and give the scene a few seconds.  The audience recognises it as somewhere, sometime, they have done something equally silly, practical or instinctive themselves. That little piece gives a character life, it is not perfection. But it is observation.

This unfortunately is what we are in danger of losing. AI can generate an extraordinarily convincing approximation of a human being. The shawl, its colour, texture, movement and even the physics would have been right.  But can it notice and decide, in that moment, how an ordinary action can become extraordinarily human?

It may in sometime. But until then, I would rather we didn’t remove the human from the process as technology can. Technology is certainly not the enemy. A camera didn’t replace the actor, the editing software didn’t replace the director, the digital production didn’t replace the writer. So AI shouldn’t replace the human either. It should give the human more room to be human.

The future of creativity will not belong to whoever can generate the most content. It will belong to whoever can still notice the little things. The shawl, the hesitation, the awkward pause, the look that wasn’t in the script, the joke that happened accidentally, the imperfection that made a character believable. Most of the times the thing that makes a story feel real is precisely the thing no machine was asked to create.

Hope the micro drama producers are listening !