The uncanny middle
The worst outcome is a piece that is nearly convincing. Clearly stylised work is fine, and genuinely photoreal work is fine; the middle — almost right, subtly wrong — triggers a specific distrust that transfers directly to the product.
The fix is usually to commit rather than to push for more realism. A deliberate look outperforms a failed attempt at passing, and it is far cheaper to achieve reliably.
Product drift
The most common technical giveaway in AI product video is the product changing between shots — a logo shifting, proportions moving, a detail appearing and disappearing. Viewers may not consciously identify it, but it reads as wrong.
This is a process failure rather than a model failure. Locking product references before any motion work begins is the established fix, and skipping that step is the usual cause.
Scripts nobody would say
Generated scripts drift toward the fluent and the generic — grammatical, well-structured, and unlike how anyone actually talks about a product they use. In creator-style formats specifically, that polish is the tell.
Read it aloud. If you would not say it, it will not sound like someone saying it.
Format-blind production
A piece composed for widescreen and then cropped to vertical loses its composition. A piece composed vertically and letterboxed into a widescreen slot looks like an error. Format belongs in the brief, before generation, not in the export step.
No selection step
The failure underneath most of the others is generating and shipping without a real selection pass. The pipeline should produce more than it delivers, and something should be discarded for being merely acceptable.
If nothing is being cut, the bar is not being enforced — and the average of what you ship is the only quality signal an audience ever sees.