Garden Snaps: Skeuomorphism

New word for your vocabulary.

You know that feeling when we legacy producers sit around saying, “I should start playing around with Midjourney and AI VFX apps. You know, to get the hang of them. This stuff is really going to transform cinema…”

Yeah, that’s skeuomorphism at work.

Traditionally, the term refers to design elements in new technology that mimic old-school objects—like digital buttons that look like physical ones. But Doug Shapiro, in his piece GenAI Video as a New Form, broadens the definition to critique how new media—AI-generated content, digital storytelling—often just imitates old formats instead of fully embracing what the technology can actually do.

This reminds me of blockchain and NFTs. NFTs were supposed to revolutionize ownership, but instead, they just mimicked traditional collectibles. A digital flex. People spent millions on JPEGs of cartoon monkeys.

Anyone still talking about Bored Apes?

Exactly.

So, is AI-generated content going to look and feel like TV shows and movies? Of course. That’s the first step. We shape new tools to fit the patterns we already know. That’s why we’re seeing AI-generated shorts, trailers, music videos, and commercials that still follow the same storytelling structures.

But then a friend sent me a blog post about a fascinating TikTok channel: a Time Traveler POV experience. 50 million views.

@timetravellerpovPOV: You wake up in Pompeii on Eruption Day #history #historytok #ai #pompeii

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Each video puts you in a different historical disaster—9/11 in NYC, Chernobyl in 1986, Pompeii before the eruption. No backstory, no character development, just pure immediacy. It’s janky, cut together with cheap VFX, but it works. The storytelling keeps you locked in.

And I thought—this is new. This is AI-powered, internet-native storytelling.

Then I searched TikTok again. Suddenly, dozens of identical Time Traveler POV accounts. Or maybe the original was already copying someone else?

So now we’re in a different conversation: if an idea is this easy to replicate, how do we value creativity? AI can push us into wild new directions, but if the barrier to entry is just a few clever prompts, AI-assisted editing, and AI-generated music, what actually makes something original?

Every viral idea gets ripped off a thousand times.

And as these ideas evolve, morphing away from the original creator, will audiences even care who came up with them?

Which brings us to what we all should be thinking about.

For those who handcraft stories—keep telling them. Fuck AI. Make things that feel human. People will still crave them. They always have.

For those who see AI as a tool to enhance storytelling—embrace it. There’s opportunity now, not just in some theoretical future. You might create something that feels human but also mind-bending, something that looks and plays like a movie or TV show but uses AI to push form in unexpected ways. And it might work. It might find an audience.

And for those who think AI is just going to steamroll everything—look, disruption is inevitable. The form will evolve. AI will shift attention elsewhere. But it’s not wiping out everything.

We don’t live in a black-and-white world where AI wins and human creativity dies.

We live in a world where both can exist—where adaptation, ingenuity, and authenticity still matter.

Maybe that’s the real lesson of skeuomorphism. AI content doesn’t have to mimic what we already know—it might find its own form, something entirely different from movies and TV as we know them. There’s a reason certain formats endure, and maybe it’s the restrictions of the original form that give it a unique power. Sometimes, embracing limitations is where real creativity lives. Perhaps the infinite possibilities of AI are a bit like a snake eating its own tail—a cycle that only finds meaning when it chooses its own shape.

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