It seems like everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence and how it’s changing publishing and the arts. But what is it? And when you buy a Gecko Edit service, how exactly are our robot overlords involved?
This blog post will talk about
- what Artificial Intelligence is (and isn’t)
- the tools I use to edit your texts
- why I will never use generative AI to edit your text
- what happens if you bring an AI-generated text to me.
What is AI?
Some people think that “AI editing tools” includes any kind of software that suggests corrections to your text, but that’s far too broad a definition and not entirely accurate. At its core, AI is software that can analyze patterns and learn from them, and then tweak its own programming based on that analysis. When we talk about “training” AI, we mean feeding it large quantities of data so that it has more patterns to learn from. Most recently, the Atlantic published a database of the 183,000 titles that have been used (without their authors’ consent) to train several AI engines. That is the data that has been used to train AI like Chat GPT, and that’s why it’s a problem. You can search the database here, though you may need to be a subscriber to the Atlantic.
An algorithm in the sense that I use it here is not the same as “the algorithm” of social media. Here, I mean it in the traditional sense of being a set of instructions that is followed step by step. So, almost all software follows an algorithm, but not all software is AI.
What software does Gecko Edit use?
In addition to the industry standard Microsoft Word and Adobe, the tools I use for editing are:
Perfectit 5, which follows a set checklist of consistency searches and suggests that they need attention. It does not learn from the texts it is analyzing, and it does not alter its own programming, so it is not AI. It’s just an incredibly helpful tool, especially since they’ve created an official Chicago Manual of Style checklist. PerfectIt is a complex and beautiful algorithm, but it’s not AI.
TextExpander lets me type in shortcuts I created myself to spit out text I don’t feel like typing over and over again. Most often, I use it to add helpful information to sensitivity or authenticity queries, such as a definition of a term or a link to a relevant style guide or article explaining why that term is problematic in this context. The TextExpander snippet is purely output; it does not read the text I am expanding a snippet into. It doesn’t alter its own programming based on analysis, so it’s not AI.
Dubsado is a client management tool that I use to assist me with my admin side of things. It follows set workflows that I created to send template emails I’ve pre-written so you can be guided along each step of the process, and then it manages the project from start to finish. For example, Dubsado will usually send an email to you to remind you about an upcoming payment, or it might notify me that someone has filled out my contact form and I need to put together a proposal. Saving me this time lets me reduce the hourly cost of admin, which helps keep my rates lower. Dubsado never sees your text itself and doesn’t alter its own programming. It is not AI.
Macros are little sets of instructions that tell Word to do something that it’s a pain to repeat often. For example, I have a macro that will copy a word, open a new tab in my browser, access the dictionary, and then look that word up. It saves me clicks, which saves me time and saves my clients money. These do not read the text or learn from the text. Often, they’re just running a very complicated “Find and Replace” sequence. They do not alter their own programming and are not AI.
As you can see, I use a lot of software to help make my editing efficient, but I don’t use AI to edit or run my business.
Does Gecko Edit use AI tools?
A resounding NO. I do not use AI to edit, and I do not use it as an assistant either. I have never and will never copy a client’s text into an AI tool for any purpose. This includes Grammarly, which has some fudgy language in their Ts and Cs that makes me a bit uncomfortable, so I’m erring on the side of caution here. But I don’t use Grammarly anyway; I find it breaks more than it fixes. The same goes for Hemingway, ProWritingAid, and similar tools; I don’t find them particularly helpful in my work, so I don’t use them.
Just out of curiosity, I did experiment personally with Chat GPT. I sincerely believe AI should be used to do the boring drudge work so we can spend our human time and energy making art. So I asked it to make a meal plan for me, based on some preferences (two adults, just a week’s worth of breakfast, lunch and dinner, no oven, and I don’t like seafood very much) and it seemed to be doing pretty well, until I asked it to then make a shopping list for me based on that meal plan, and it told me to buy 48 bananas. And some cod.
Other brilliant editors like Adrienne Montgomerie have already put generative AI through its paces in editing texts, and the results were just as dismal.
But aside from it just not being very good at it, there are ethical problems as well. As I mentioned earlier, these AI tools have been trained on copyrighted texts and the legal ramifications of that are a tangled mess. If you’ve used the tool to create any part of your text, then you’re using something that has been taken from another author without their permission. Sounds like theft to me. We could get into a Ship of Theseus argument about how the tiny little parts of a text might not necessarily constitute a representative whole—that famous author didn’t copyright the word “and” or the idea of a sparkly vampire. But intellectual property law is beyond the scope of my role as editor. And I’d rather not get involved in it, honestly. Let’s let the lawyers bash it out.
What if you hire me to work on an AI-generated text?
Hopefully you won’t! Sure, you can use AI to generate an outline for a blog post, or find SEO keywords to use in an article, or spit out some made-up elf names. But the key point is that you do the actual writing yourself, in your voice. Your trusty human editor will catch the errors, and this way, you won’t risk telling your readers to buy 48 unnecessary bananas.
I have also begun including a clause in my contract in which the client agrees I am not responsible should there be any legal action taken against them for using AI-generated text.
Once you’ve agreed to that, I’ll do the job you hired me to do, and it might take a bit longer because of all the errors the robots have introduced. And the voice in it might be a bit robotic, in that gushy, positive way it seems to have been programmed to be, and I might struggle to uncover anything of substance in the points it’s avoiding making, and your readers’ eyes might glaze over at a plot entirely devoid of surprises or human creativity. But thanks to me, the spelling will be pretty good, and the commas will be in the right places.
As editors, our job is to make the book better, not perfect, and while we care about your book more than a robot is capable of caring, we don’t have to be in love with the writing to catch the errors. We just say “It’s not my book!” and get on with it.
It’s not my book.
But is it really yours?
