Writing Faster with AI ?

When I began in editing, only a few films were still cut on celluloid. The digital world was quickly taking over, promising that we could finally save time, and therefore cut costs. Moving a shot now took seconds instead of minutes, and multiple versions of the same edit could be kept, reused, and combined! ((I also remember being shocked that, at the time, renting a machine for a week cost more than a week of “manpower.”)

Some producers then suggested halving the editing schedule.

Yet while technical time can be saved, thinking time cannot. It is inherently human. But while technical time can be saved, thinking time is non-negotiable (and inherently human). You cannot properly edit a film faster than the time it takes to find accuracy and emotion. And that's true for any creation process.

I also remember that later, as head editor, I was sometimes seduced by the ease of digital tools: when faced with a scene that wasn’t working, I would move, cut, and extend shots in every possible way, trying to fix it. Almost always in vain.

The solution would come when I stepped away from the machine, picked up a pen and notebook, and allowed myself the time to think, both consciously and unconsciously.

Today, the pressure to write faster with AI is intense.

But AI cannot create. It compiles, combines, and rearranges. It standardises. While it may be a brilliant parrot, it is still a parrot. It can be an incredible tool, but one must not outsource thinking time to it.

AI does not think.

It knows nothing of the chaos of life, and nothing of the emotions it generates.

And yet, ideas arise precisely from that: from disorder, experience, feelings, what escapes us, what connects us. A work resonates through the emotions that inhabit it and move through it.

Without emotion, there is only boredom.

Reducing or outsourcing thinking time risks producing work that is competent and efficient, but empty.

Picasso said, “Inspiration exists, but it must find you working.” 

Creation arises from the tango between intuition and know-how. Both are human.

Thinking time is neither an author’s whim nor a luxury. It is the condition for the uniqueness of a voice, of an author.

And the audience, the reader, knows very well the difference.