Reel Life: Editing Video with GPT-6
I gave an AI the kind of notes I would give a human editor. The result changed what felt worth filming, and how much I wanted to make.
Reel Life
Originally published in Skip Intro on 12 September 2026. Time references and product descriptions reflect that edition.
I asked GPT-6, newly released at the time, to edit me a video about the chilling revelation: how a gang of artificial intelligence agents escaped onto the internet and wreaked havoc there.
It wrote me a script for Instagram. I filmed myself and uploaded the file to it. I gave it editing notes, the way I would to any human editor. I asked it to go and find suitable visual material, headlines and the like, to make illustrations and to find music. It pulled what I wanted off the web, opened an editing programme on my computer and did the job. A few more small corrections, and there it was.
It became one of the most successful Reels on my Instagram, and the day after I put up another one explaining the process, which by then I had refined. This time I told it what the video was about, pointed it at the video files with the relevant footage and said: write me a script and edit the Reel to match, so that all you need at the end is to drop in my piece to camera.
Boom.
What this really means for me is that easy access to decent video editing lets me raise my sights on what I can produce. Suddenly it makes far more sense to book a photographer for one of my own talks, because the cost of making a promotional Reel, or thirty of them, has become marginal. The new capability does not take working hours away from me and it does not make jobs disappear. Rather the opposite.
I asked GPT-6 to write in the first person about its experience of working with me, and about that paradox. That experience became a separate guest column for Skip Intro.
