I found out something interesting the other day. The film that wins Best Picture almost always wins Best Editing too. And that doesn't surprise me. In my own work, the thing that takes something from good to great is never the first draft. It's the reviewing. The editing. The rounds of sharpening that happen after the initial idea lands.
One thing I've noticed since bringing AI into my workflow is that you can get to a first draft really quickly. Like, remarkably fast. But the review process still takes the same amount of time it always did. So reviewing becomes this bottleneck - you're producing more work, but it's all banking up waiting for your eyes.
Which got me thinking - is there a way AI can help with reviewing, not just creating?
So I tried something. AI is actually quite good at role-playing. You can ask it to take on the perspective of a copywriter, a developer, a specific customer, or even yourself if you give it enough to work with. I asked it to look at a piece of work through my eyes - flag what I'd flag, critique what I'd critique. On the first pass, it picked up maybe 90% of what I would have said myself.
Then I took it further - I got those different perspectives talking to each other. A copywriter and a UX designer and your ideal customer, sitting around a table, working through trade-offs and coming back to me with recommendations. I'm still the one making the decisions, but the legwork has been done.
And you can have it loop. Review, refine, review again. I've been calling it an iterative feedback process. Some days I'll set it running before I head to the gym and come back an hour later to something noticeably better. What's left for me is the nuanced stuff that needs a human call.