AI can't do the work for us

I recently watched Exposing the AI Video Influencer Scam by Vlad Sateev, a video editor with more than ten years in the craft. It is worth the thirteen minutes.

He takes one of those viral videos — the kind that promises an AI model edited a whole piece “in one shot” — and goes through it step by step. The timestamps don’t add up. There’s no real screen recording of the process. The comparisons are misleading, and the link in the description leads straight to the AI tool being promoted. As he puts it himself, this isn’t about hating AI — he uses it in his own work. It’s about dishonest packaging.

I want to add one thing to his point.

The shortcut isn’t the AI. It’s the person.

This year I designed and built eight products with AI at my side — a strategy game, a free UX bootcamp, a civic map of Sofia, a gifting app and a few more. I wrote a novel with it. I’m a big believer in these tools, and I use them every single day.

And still, not one of those products was made “in one shot”.

AI wrote a lot of code for me. It did not decide what the product should be. It did not sit with people and watch where they get lost. It did not notice that a flow felt wrong, that a button was in the wrong place, or that the copy sounded cold. It did not choose what to leave out — and leaving things out is most of what good design is.

Every good result came from a loop: I describe the goal, the AI makes a first version, I look at it with a professional eye, I find what’s wrong, I explain it better, and we go again. Many times. The quality of the result was never better than the quality of my judgement in that loop.

What the “one shot” videos hide

The videos Vlad takes apart sell a fantasy: you don’t need to learn anything anymore, just type a prompt. That fantasy works because it hits two feelings at once — fear of being left behind, and the hope of skipping the hard part.

But the hard part is the part that makes you valuable.

If AI can produce an average result for anyone, then an average result is worth very little. What’s worth something is knowing why one version is better than another — and that only comes from doing the work, failing, and doing it again. Vlad says there are no shortcuts, and that volume beats luck. I agree completely. AI gives us more volume than ever. It doesn’t give us taste.

So we still have to give our best

My main takeaway is simple: we still need to give our best as professionals, because AI cannot do the entire work by itself.

Use the tools. Use them a lot — they are amazing. But keep learning the craft underneath them. Know your After Effects, your Figma, your code, your research methods, well enough to tell when the machine is wrong. Be honest about what was done by you and what was done by the tool. And be careful with anyone who promises the result without the work.

AI makes a good professional much faster. It doesn’t make anyone a professional.