I hate AI.
That would be a better headline, wouldn’t it.
Cleaner. Sharper. More shareable. Everyone gets their role
immediately. The sceptics nod along. The true believers wind up for a
fight. The algorithm gets its little hit of conflict and we all pretend
something meaningful just happened.
And honestly, some days I get the appeal.
There’s a kind of AI optimism that feels completely detached from
reality. The kind that treats creativity like a bottleneck, taste like a
rounding error, and every hard-won human instinct like a temporary
inconvenience before the software catches up.
I get why people want to burn it all down.
But that’s not the honest version.
I use AI every day. It runs parts of my business. It clears admin out
of the way. It speeds up research. It drafts the boring things I’d lose
an hour to. It buys me back time I used to bleed on work that drained my
brain before the real work even started.
So I’m not anti-AI. I’m anti-bullshit.
And after a year of using this stuff properly, not theoretically, I
think the problem is simpler than people make it. AI is useful. Often
wildly useful. But in creative work, it keeps falling short in the same
places.
Not because the models are broken. Because the work is human.
Last week we pitched a documentary.
AI gave me a treatment that was structurally sound, well researched,
coherent, and polished in exactly the way people mean when they say
“this is pretty good, actually.”
It hit all the right beats.
I read it and thought: this is exactly what a good creative would
write if they didn’t care about the project.
The treatment we actually sent came from a 9pm conversation where our
editor mentioned something he’d noticed in the footage. The way the
subject’s hands moved differently when he talked about his kids versus
when he talked about his work. That one detail became the spine of the
whole piece.
No tool would have found it. Because no tool was in the room.
That’s the first thing AI falls short on. Taste. It
can give you something correct. It can’t give you something true. It
doesn’t know which moment is the one the whole story actually turns
on.
Here’s the second one. Restraint.
AI adds. That’s what it’s built to do. Give it a draft and it will
give you a longer draft. Give it a concept and it will give you ten
adjacent concepts. Ask it to tighten something and it’ll still quietly
hand you more.
Good creative work subtracts.
It cuts the line you love. It holds on a face two seconds longer than
feels comfortable. It leaves the awkward silence in. It ends the film
where the film actually ends, not where the script said to.
No AI has ever told me to cut the bit I was proudest of. A good
editor does it weekly.
Third. Noticing.
AI can summarise a transcript. It cannot tell you the thing the
person didn’t say. It can’t clock the pause before the answer, the
sentence someone talked around, the story they started and then backed
away from.
Documentary work lives in that gap. So does any real interview, any
real pitch meeting, any real conversation with a client who’s telling
you one thing and meaning another.
The machine sees the words. A human sees the flinch.
And the fourth one is the quietest. Stakes.
AI has never been scared of getting it wrong. It’s never had to sit
with a decision overnight. It’s never walked into an edit suite at 2am,
fifty hours into a cut, and realised the whole thing needs to be rebuilt
from the third act backwards. It’s never had its name on the thing.
Craft comes from caring. Caring comes from skin in the game. AI
doesn’t have any skin in the game. It can’t. And you can feel the
absence in anything it makes alone.
So why do I still use it.
Because all of that is the one percent. The actual making. The taste,
the restraint, the noticing, the caring. That’s where the work
lives.
The other ninety-nine percent is the stuff that eats your day. The
admin. The scheduling. The research. The second drafts of internal
emails. The meeting prep. The transcripts. The briefs. The boring,
repetitive, energy-leaking grind that used to stand between me and the
work that actually mattered.
That’s what AI is extraordinary at. And that’s the whole point.
Human craft, machine assist. Not as a slogan. As a working principle.
The machine clears the runway so the humans can actually fly the
plane.
I don’t hate AI. I hate what happens when people use it as a shortcut
to the part of the work that isn’t meant to be a shortcut.
Use it for the ninety-nine. Protect the one. Spend the hours you get
back on the stuff only a human can do.
That’s the standard. That’s the bar. That’s the work.
Reply and tell me: where has AI genuinely failed you
in creative work? And where has it surprised you? I read every
reply.
— Sam