A personal line I have in how I use AI tools is that it’s ok for utility tasks like transcribing audio, cutting empty audio from hours of recordings, spell and grammar checks, finding chapter points in a video or podcast, etc. but it’s not ok to use for creative tasks like recording an actual video, writing a blog post, generating a photograph of a sunset for a poster, etc. But I’m realizing more and more that as much as I want that distinction, the companies and corporations making apps don’t allow us to have any sort of line. It’s All AI All the Time! and we the people have to help the corporations pay for it all because it’s the future and it’s profitable and it will make us all rich. Honest. Just give us $8 more per month and you’ll see!

I say all that because I got an email from Descript, a podcast audio editor turned video editor turned AI slop generator app that I use for some of my work, is raising their prices to pay for the AI credits and 4K video files they’re throwing around the web:

Cristi Cotovan has a great video explaining the changes to Descript’s pricing on YouTube, but the basic gist is that instead of paying Descript based on how many minutes of audio or video you want transcribed, you’re now paying for how much content you upload. And as you can see from Cristi’s handy explainer, a 1 hour recording with a guest that you might have audio separate from video easily uses up 4 hours of your quota under the new system.

Also, AI credits take the place of unlimited usage of their “Underlord” AI tool. So now if you use “remove all ‘uhms’” or “summarize this recording”, you’re using up credits each time you do any sort of AI assisted editing or automation.

From Cristi:

This is a big shift away from what many users liked about the product. So, a lot of people in the Descript community and our own Facebook group proposed a simpler solution. A basic plan that focuses just on the essentials. Import, transcribe, edit via text, remove filler words, and export. We don’t all want or need all of this Al video generation and chat agent trying to rewrite your content and mess up the project.

...when people complained about these changes in the Descript Discord channel, the Descript team said they’d actually surveyed existing users about these changes and this new model and reported that users were broadly happy. Honestly, I’d like to meet those customers who agree with this pricing shift, because from everything I’m seeing, that’s not the general sentiment.

I have no doubt that what Descript is trying to build costs money. What I disagree with is the idea that a tool like Descript needs to have All the AI All the Time—AAAT for short?—in order to be a great product. But they’re funded primarily OpenAI, so what choice do they have?

From Descript’s About page

Cristi’s recommendation near the end of his video is for people to check out Riverside as an option since it’s come a long way in feature parity with Descript’s editor. In my experience with clients, Riverside’s remote recordings work much better than Descript’s Rooms.

But ultimately, Riverside is going to do the same thing where they’ll add features to have All the AI All the Time that will turn into pricing increases as compute and storage prices go up to pay for OpenAI, etc. It’s a cycle we’re in where every feature has to have some sort of AI tie in, whether real or just in name, in order to get funding and justify price increases to pay for the funding.

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A brief aside: The onetime cost of buying Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro 10+ years ago continues to be the best thing I ever did for my business expenses. Apple may not be fast at throwing AI into all their apps, but my bank account is pretty thankful I don’t have to help Apple pay for OpenAI’s expenses.

So maybe my personal line needs to move back from trying to have Some AI Some of the Time to No AI since corporations aren’t going to allow me to be a moderate in my AI usage.

(No AI tools were used at all in the writing of this blog post. A piece of cinnamon raisin toast with butter and honey and a glass of water were consumed instead.)