less long by AI (faster to detect changes than humans).
Many things change things. A bit of smoke in the air might have been from a gunshot that happened 10 minutes ago, or it might have been from a cigarette 15 minutes ago. Binary search relies on changes that indicate a specific thing has happened–a broken window, a bike no longer there, blood stains on the street. Anything undetectable by humans would still be useless to AIs. A bit a smoke? Could have been a gunshot 3 minutes ago, could have been a cigarette, could be fog, could be a vape. Even the things that AIs are truly useful for, like interpreting video compression artifacts, wouldn’t help, because any number of things can cause compression artifacts. How could it tell what pixels are slightly off color because of a gunshot 3 minutes ago, and what pixels are slightly off color because someone walked past the camera?
At that point, just feed the entire video to the AI and have it tell you when it sees guns or puffs of smoke or hears screams. Binary search is useless when you can just have a machine watch the entire video in one sitting over the course of five seconds and tell you when the interesting thing happens.