{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/film-and-video-editors/", "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology", "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.", "scored_at": "2026-08-11", "model": "claude-opus-5", "occupation": { "title": "Film and Video Editors", "soc_code": "27-4032", "category": "Media", "us_employment": 25610, "median_annual_wage": 75420 }, "verdict": "COOKED", "risk_resistance": 32, "contested": false, "near_boundary": true, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 9, "embodiment": 4, "liability_shield": 1, "trust_premium": 8, "judgment_accountability": 10 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "A 9 sits mid-band because the assembly layer — ingest, multicam sync, transcript-based stringouts, subtitle burn-in, 9:16 reframes, loudness normalization to -14 LUFS — is now a menu command, while structuring a 45-minute unscripted episode from mismatched interview coverage and finding the one reaction shot that makes a beat work still requires someone watching every frame and deciding what it means.", "embodiment": "A 4, not 0, only because you still physically handle drives, LTO pulls, and reference monitors in a calibrated suite and occasionally sit on set for on-location assembly — but nothing in the job requires leaving a desk with a keyboard, tablet, and two displays.", "liability_shield": "There is no licence, no board, and no exam for editing; the E&O policy and the delivery contract sit with the producer or post house, so a botched cut costs you the next gig, not your right to practice.", "trust_premium": "An 8 reflects that directors and showrunners rehire the specific editor who already knows their taste and can read \"it feels flat around the middle\" — but on branded, corporate, and social work you're a line item on a rate card, replaced between projects without a conversation.", "judgment_accountability": "A 10 covers the real discretion in pacing, structure, and what a documentary subject's on-camera contradiction is allowed to imply — but the director, showrunner, or client approves the cut before it ships, so the ambiguous high-stakes call is theirs to sign off on." }, "rationale": "Editing is entirely screen-based, and the volume tiers of the work — logging footage, syncing audio, transcript-driven rough cuts, captioning, reframing for vertical, basic color and audio cleanup, cutting 40 social variants from one master — are already handled well by Premiere/Resolve AI features and text-based editors. What survives is narrative judgment: pacing a scene so it lands emotionally, structuring a documentary from 200 hours of unscripted material, and sitting in a room with a director or client absorbing vague notes and turning them into a cut. The modal editor today does more corporate, social, and promo work than feature narrative, and that modal work is exactly the part collapsing in price.", "outlook": "Total editor headcount shrinks as one senior editor plus AI absorbs the volume work; the survivors are story-structure editors and post supervisors with direct client trust.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Task-mix shift is genuine here: if the assembly/variant/caption tier is fully absorbed by text-based editing and Resolve/Premiere AI, the remaining paid work is long-form structure from unscripted material — documentary and reality story editing, where the job is finding a narrative in 200 hours with no script. Watch whether documentary/story-editor postings hold while assistant editor and social-variant postings vanish; the surviving role scores higher because the routine tier is gone from it.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Credit and provenance rules that make a named human editor a marketable fact: Motion Picture Editors Guild (IATSE Local 700) pushing AI terms into the 2026 basic agreement round, plus festival/awards eligibility rules (e.g. Academy or Sundance requiring disclosure of generative tools in editorial) so a 'cut by a human editor' credit becomes something buyers of prestige work specifically contract for.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "If the editor becomes the accountable verifier of what a generative pipeline produced — signing that no footage was synthetically altered, that consent/release terms were honored, that a documentary subject was not misrepresented by a reframe or splice — the role owns a consequential call. Broadcaster standards departments (BBC editorial guidelines, network S&P) already require a named person to attest to unmanipulated footage in factual programming; extending that attestation formally to editorial AI output would raise this.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 } ], "ceiling_note": "Even with every lever, this occupation is capped well below safe: the ceiling is a much smaller field of long-form story editors on prestige and factual work. Corporate, promo and social editing — the majority of the 25,610 — has no lever at all, because the buyer never wanted a human, only a cut." }, "adjudication": { "method": "two independent runs agreed on the verdict", "outcome": "corroborated", "run_totals": [ 32, 31 ], "run_verdicts": [ "COOKED", "COOKED" ] }, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 30770, "wage": 61180 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 28160, "wage": 62650 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 27570, "wage": 63780 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 22410, "wage": 67250 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 28030, "wage": 62680 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 32080, "wage": 63520 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 29240, "wage": 66600 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 28860, "wage": 70980 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 25610, "wage": 75420 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -16.8, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }