After 25 years building scripts for every major studio, I'll say something the industry doesn't always want to hear out loud: AI is genuinely useful in our workflow. It's faster than any human at a first-pass transcription of clean dialogue, it doesn't get tired at hour nine of a docuseries, and for unscripted content with cooperative audio, it can give an editor a usable rough draft in minutes. We use it. Most serious shops do. Pretending otherwise isn't honesty — it's marketing.
But here's where the line is, and why it isn't moving anytime soon: an AI can transcribe, but it can't deliver. It doesn't know that an As-Broadcast Script needs scene headings formatted to the network's house style. It doesn't catch when a character says "Sarah" but the on-screen text reads "Sara." It can't tell a forced narrative from a lower third, won't flag a music cue that needs clearance, and has no idea your distributor wants timecodes to the frame and speaker IDs in all caps. That work — the formatting, the QC, the judgment calls about what a deliverable actually is — is what a Dialogue List, an ABS, or a DCS gets paid for. AI gives you a transcript. A scriptwriter gives you something you can ship.
The smart play, then, isn't AI versus humans — it's knowing which job belongs to which. At Scriptz, we lean on AI where it earns its keep: rough transcription passes, search inside long-form content, speeding up the unglamorous middle of a project. Then a human editor takes over for everything that touches a delivery spec. That's not nostalgia for the old way. It's just what 25 years of post-production has taught us: the tools change, the standards don't. If your distributor is going to reject a file for a misplaced timecode or a missing forced narrative, it doesn't matter how fast you got there — it matters that you got it right.