Earlier this week, The Podcast Host released their Independent Podcaster Report 2025, and there was one section that stood out to me more than any other.

One of the 5 big takeaways was AI doesn’t guarantee time saved:

There was no clear difference in time spent between podcasters using AI and those who don’t. Even so, there are many variables at play, so it’s difficult to draw firm conclusions.

There could be a couple of reasons for this:

1. The podcasters who responded to this survey aren’t using AI effectively.
2. AI enables them to do more, so they’re replacing AI tasks with new, different tasks.
3. AI actually create more work for them because to do good work, they need to check and fix what it’s doing for them.

A quote I heard on Scrubs, that appears to have its origins from a book called The House of God, is “Show me a med student that only triples my work, and I’ll kiss his feet.”

Could it be that AI is replacing the med student, and that it actually creates more work for us in the long run?

The AI advocates are rolling their eyes, believing they have it all figured out, and most of us are just using it wrong.

But the truth is that for creative work, Human-in-Control is the best way to create the best work. Time savings from AI is a mirage.

I cannot stress this enough: the people who say they don’t need to check AI on creative work are kidding themselves, or don’t care about the quality of their work.

Full. Stop.

The way to actually save time is to take predictable, repetitive tasks off your plate through automation.

Instead of feeding something into AI, then checking and correcting it, you can automate tasks with clearly defined inputs and output, and know the task will be done right every time.