Artificial intelligence writing assistance tools, often called AI editors, have improved significantly over the last year or so. Gone are many of the silly, wrong suggestions that plagued earlier versions. (Change “a man eating fried chicken” to “a man-eating fried chicken” comes to mind from a book I edited.) AI editors are learning and cleaning up their act.
But AI editing exists to help writers improve their writing skills, not to replace editors or provide real editing. And just as good author content stands apart from AI-generated works, a good editor stands apart from AI editors. If you’re an author, your work competes with AI-created content, and you already have a good idea of the difference.
AI editing is a great tool to support and complement human writers and editors, but AI can’t replace a good editor. Human editors ensure continuity and assess plot development and hole identification, story flow, and readability. A human’s touch is far better for finding and fixing or developing those elements. One award-winning author wrote to me, “Editing is expensive, but failing because a computer program didn’t pick up that you changed the main character’s name five times is demoralizing.” That’s much more common than you might think, as are plot holes like characters dying, then appearing in later scenes alive and well — or plopping onto the sofa…when they’re already sitting on the sofa.
AI tends to be pretty good at finding things like tautologies, homophones, and simple usage errors. But I’ve seen AI editing frequently miss things like pronoun disagreement and the heavy use of passive voice. And AI very often misses big-picture issues, including plot holes, head-hopping, and breaches of the “show, don’t tell” rule. Strong human editors find and suggest fixes for those errors, and can assess and provide input for marketability and genre selection, and whether passages might be offensive or ostracize groups of readers.
Note, too, that AI often does not allow for the exceptions of tone, dialect, or the writer’s style. Good human editors comment on such points but allow for exceptions. (For example: “Whom” is correct here, but this character would probably not say that. Or: Adjective phrases that directly precede the noun they modify should be hyphenated, but if your relaxed style is to hyphenate only where not doing so might confuse readers, that’s fine. And the list is long.) A good human editor routinely rejects/overrides a significant percentage of “errors” found and fixed, and importantly, can tell you why.
In short, AI can get an author out of some pickles, but there’s no substitute for a solid human editor.
Sticks and Stones Freelance Editing 