The friction problem

Let’s be honest. You’ve heard both versions of the AI story by now.

Version one: AI is coming for your job, your craft, your livelihood. Hundreds of thousands of creative jobs gone by 2026. Algorithms writing scripts, generating footage, replacing the humans who used to do all of it.

Version two: AI is magic. Prompt a movie into existence. Infinite creativity at zero cost. The tech CEOs will have you believe we’re weeks away from replacing every filmmaker, writer, and creative professional on the planet.

Here’s the thing. Both versions are wrong.

And if you’re a filmmaker, a business owner, a marketer, or anyone who creates things for a living, the truth is actually a lot more interesting than either of those stories.

The real problem isn’t AI. It’s the friction.

Think about the last time you recorded something. An interview. A meeting. A testimonial. A presentation.

How much of that recording was actually useful? And how long did it take you to find the parts that mattered?

That’s the problem worth solving. Not whether AI can replace human creativity (it can’t, and I’ll get to why in a minute) but whether it can get out of the way and let you spend your time on the work that actually requires you.

For filmmakers, this friction is extreme. I’ll shoot a full day of interviews, eight, ten, twelve hours of footage, and the finished piece might be eight minutes long. The gap between raw material and meaningful story is where most of the time, money, and energy disappears. And it’s exhausting. Not creatively exhausting. Just tedious.

But this isn’t just a filmmaker’s problem. It’s a podcast producer with 200 episodes they can’t search. A non-profit with years of community interview footage sitting on a hard drive they’ve never had the budget to properly cut. A small business with forty customer testimonials they recorded and never edited. Same problem, different industry.

Why AI can’t replace the soul of what you do

James Cameron, not exactly someone who shies away from technology, called AI a “disembodied mind” producing a kind of word salad that lacks the fundamental ingredient required to move an audience.

What he means is this: AI can recombine human experience. It can pattern-match, remix, and generate content that looks like the real thing. But it cannot feel. And in any creative work, whether you’re making a film, pitching a client, or telling your brand’s story, feeling it is the whole job.

The moment in an interview where someone’s voice tightens before they say something important. The pause before the sentence that changes everything. The look on someone’s face that tells you this is the take. No algorithm flags that because it matters. It flags it because the data patterns match something that mattered once before.

That’s a meaningful distinction. The output might look similar. The process is completely different.

So what is AI actually good for?

Friction removal. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

The best use of AI in any creative workflow is to eliminate the parts of the job that don’t require you, so you can spend more time on the parts that do.

In my own work, I use an AI-assisted toolkit called Plotline to help compress the gap between raw footage and a structured first cut. It transcribes everything, identifies emotionally significant moments, finds the themes that keep coming back across multiple interviews, and hands me a starting point in my editing software. What used to take three weeks of assembly editing now takes a few days.

But here’s the part that matters: nothing hits the final cut without my approval. The AI surfaces candidates. The editor decides. Every single time.

That’s not a limitation of the tool. That’s the whole philosophy. Because the moment you hand editorial judgment to an algorithm, you’ve stopped making something that feels like anything. You’ve started producing content. And there’s already enough of that.

What this means for you, even if you never touch a camera

The principle scales beyond filmmaking.

If you run a business, you’re a storyteller. Every pitch, every proposal, every piece of content you put into the world is a story about who you are and why it matters. The friction in your workflow, the hours spent on the wrong things, the gap between what you captured and what you actually needed, that’s where AI can help.

Not by replacing your judgment. Not by generating your ideas. But by handling the mechanical work so your judgment and your ideas have more room to breathe.

We’re in a strange moment right now where the technology is genuinely useful, the hype is genuinely overblown, and most people are stuck somewhere between panic and paralysis. Neither helps.

The smarter move is to figure out where the friction is in your work, the stuff that’s tedious rather than hard, repetitive rather than creative, and let the tools handle that. Then spend the time you get back on the decisions that actually require a human.

That’s not a threat to your craft. That’s the point of the whole thing.

Let the machines handle the friction. You bring the soul.

The bottom line

AI isn’t going to replace the people who bring soul to their work. It’s going to replace the people who were only ever doing the mechanical parts.

If you make things that matter, things with a point of view, with emotional truth, with a real human behind them, you’re not in danger. You’re in exactly the right place.

Stop scrubbing. Start cutting.