AI — Artificial Intelligence — is supposed to make our work if not easier, then certainly faster. It’s suppose to automate the boring/repeatable parts so we can focus on the more important parts.

In all the marketing of all the AI-enhanced apps, there’s a line somewhere that says something close to this app will make you X% more efficient.

There’s a scene in Before Sunrise where Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke, was telling Celine (Julie Delpy) how it drives him crazy that people keep talking about how technology saves time.

“But what good is saved time if nobody uses it,” he says. “It just turns into more busy work.”

And with AI — at least when it comes to video, which is what I do — it’s worse.

Of course if all the conditions of the past had remained, then it would unquestionably be a time-saver (even if it just means creating space for more work). But the reality is that not all the conditions of the past remained.

Back in the day — at least for the kinds of videos I make, which are mainly talking head marketing videos — people practiced their scripts. We do two or three takes, and we’d get it. And when we come into the edit, it’s about selecting the best take because all the takes are more or less good.

These days, because the people recording the videos know that AI assisted editing applications exist, they don’t put in as much work on the recording end.

So I either get a half-hour raw file of what should be a 2-minute video because the person clearly hadn’t seen the script before, but they don’t care because they expect me to throw it onto Descript or Gling and use he remove-mistakes/retakes feature to make the cuts. Which I do, and it works, except that it adds time to the process, and we end with an inferior on-camera performance.

Or I get a video with the script more or less nailed in one take, but that’s because the person was reading from a screen to the side of the came, but they didn’t care because they expect me to use the eye-contact fix to get the pupils looking into the camera. Which, again, is doable, but is adding an extra step that didn’t need to be there.

My suspicion is that the better these AI tools get, the worse production — at least for the average online marketer — will become. And as someone who works in the industry, that breaks my heart.