Why I Tried to Replace My Editor with AI (And What Happened Next)

The tool is called Eddie AI. And over the past week, I tested it to find out whether it's truly capable of doing what assistant editors do. Especially the parts no one really wants to.

To understand why this matters, you have to zoom out.

The film and content industry is going through a major shift. The Hollywood machine is breaking down and traditional job pathways are disappearing. AI is being pitched as the answer to everything, from visual effects to voiceovers. With the looming threat it might replace us entirely. I don’t think we’re there yet. But what is here are real tools already reshaping what’s possible for small teams like mine.

Editing, at its absolute worst, is repetitive grunt work. Sorting through hours of A-roll and B-roll. Labeling, cutting, trimming, organizing. I used to spend entire days grinding through interviews just to get to the good stuff. And when you can’t afford an assistant editor (which is, like, most of the time), that slog can stop a project before it even starts.

Eddie AI changes that. It’s not trying to be your editor. It’s trying to be your assistant editor. I fed it a 150GB interview clip from a short doc I shot and normally, it would’ve taken 3–4 hours just to log and cut down. Eddie did it in under 10 minutes. There’s no amount of money and coffee that is going to get your assistant editor working that fast.

And not just a rough timeline, it auto-sorted clips by topic, removed dead air, grouped relevant quotes, and even added transitions. I was able to walk away, come back, and it was all there.

It’s not only speed. The results were accurate. Eddie picked up specific themes from the interview (“the role of running as therapy,” for example) and grouped all those moments into a clean timeline. Even the transcript-based editing was solid. You could search by text, click a line, and jump right into that clip. Felt like having a real-time searchable archive of your footage.

That alone would’ve saved me days on past projects. You can drop in hundreds of unlabeled clips and it’ll tag everything: shot types, keywords, even hyper-specific descriptions like “a person in a dress and boots holding a shovel” or “a worker planting a seedling.”

And yes, it somehow knew it was a seedling. That level of metadata opens up wild possibilities for large-scale projects like the survival show Alone, which I worked behind the scenes on. That production generates hundreds of cameras’ worth of footage over 100+ days. Logging it manually takes weeks and a small army. Eddie could streamline the whole pipeline.

Of course, this isn’t about replacing human editors, at least not yet. For me, it was about speed and bandwidth. I’m still directing, planning, structuring edits, and still working with Santi. But when you’re producing as much content as we are, a tool like Eddie becomes a third team member, handling the drudgery so we can focus on the creative.

As I see it, we’re just scratching the surface. If the first public version of Eddie is already this good, it’s hard not to imagine what next year’s release might bring.

So no, I’m not firing Santi. But I am giving him a powerful sidekick.

If you want to see exactly how it works, from interview cutdowns to searchable B-roll to full social media clips, the full video shows Eddie in action. Whether you're an editor, solo creator, or just curious about where the hell this tech is heading, go check it out.