yeah, removing the unwanted item and keeping the video uncropped is surely more desirable, but far beyond the capabilities of "ai"

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems like you're just talking about AI inpainting. That's like one of the first things people did with image diffusion technology. NVIDIA published a research paper on it back in 2018: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07723

Inpainting is harder on videos than on images, but there are plenty of models that can do it. Google's Veo 3 can remove objects from videos: https://deepmind.google/models/veo/

I simply did not know you could do that with videos. TIL!

I got a laugh out of this. Using an LLM to crop a video does feel like dropping a nuke to hammer in a nail.

It isn't even the worst I've done. I've dumped a table in ChatGPT and asked it to CSVize it and do some trivial operations on the table. This is straightforward to do in Google Sheets. It is very much like that: boiling an ocean to get some tea.