ai | The Editorial Maverick

As a believer in labeling one’s biases and then letting rip, let us begin with mine:

I despise AI. There is nothing I like about it. I don’t like the data centers, I don’t like the plutocracy behind them, and I don’t like the pliant municipalities who just bend over and drop trou for plutocracy. Not even at bayonet point could you get me to use AI to write my words for me. I take delight in watching it display the mindless trends that are its tells, sneering at its never-life.

I’m a snob. I would rather read the tortured constructions and bad spelling of the world’s worst real writer than technically correct AI.

In the many cases in which AI use is simply laziness, what my mind says is: It was so much easier than using your actual mind, wasn’t it?Today, Konrad Kujau wouldn’t have to author a phony Hitler memoir ms; he’d just feed the question to an AI and out would come the Dolfiness.

AI is here to stay, unless (as I hope) the proliferation of AI-genned content becomes recursive in that its outputs get stupider and stupider as it is increasingly its own unvetted (except by itself!) source material. It already generates fictitious references. I do not see evidence that it employs discernment on its sourcing. I think if enough QAnuts published enough wackiness, and at least made some effort at originality while not labeling themselves openly, AI would refer to them as if they were Stephen Hawking, or E.F. Hutton (ask your grandparents).

With those understandings, let’s talk about where this phenomenon is. AI goes beyond what I’m describing, of course; it can do at least something that looks like editing. In time it will probably be capable of more, unless it worsens its trend of eating its own children.

It is not that new, as far as I can see; it’s just more interactive. In essence, it’s the modern evolution of Altavista (ask your parents) or Google. What is a search engine algorithm but a form of AI? Is a word processor’s grammar check and spell check not some form of AI? Some games pit the player against relatively decent AI, which computer game designers have been trying to improve for decades. In the old Steel Panthers days, we’d sometimes delegate a trial setup to computer control just to get its sense of the position. (Andy Gailey will never see this, but those words began as his, and so was the idea. And unlike ChatGPT, he’s a person.) What’s new is that one can get it to do the work of writers and editors, at least in some ways. It takes a pretty sophisticated reader to tell it apart, which eliminates the vast majority of the modern US public.

My theory about the impact on my profession is that it will have the greatest impact on the people who don’t hire someone like me, and the people that they do hire. Consider: One is a stereotypically lazy ‘nap-my-way-through-college’ student who takes one look at the concepts of research and composition and replies: “Oh hell no. That’s actual work. I’d rather get AI to do it for me, then I’ll go through and edit out some of it so the prof can’t tell.” After muddling though, the alumnus* learned almost nothing about writing. Except, perhaps, that which would be learned by reading a few syntactically correct history papers (which isn’t enough; try reading voraciously from ages 3 to 22 if you want it by osmosis and Kodak childhood memory). Now he’s stuck. Take away his AI and his literacy is spavined.

*I think women are less prone to let a dumb computer program supply their words, probably because on balance the evidence indicates they’re slightly brighter than we are, and because I believe they are less interested in letting a computer talk over them than they are even in letting men talk over them.

So Slacker Alum, living with his parents because getting jobs is hard and might even require him to leave the house, has always had some ideas for novels. He starts having AI write the story for him, and in the process he at least becomes better at using AI. His AI novel is no worse garbage than a fair percentage of the self-published material out there, and not a little of the trad-pubbed. Does he hire an editor? Not a real one; that would take money. If he had money, he wouldn’t be doing any of this. He either hires one of the self-anointed Starving English BA Editors who thinks s/he’s qualified, or he accepts the AI editing and congratulates himself on creating moneymaking content while maintaining his slacker image. Either way, he was never going to hire me. He’s not my market and I’m not his. The Starving English BA Editors are already doing it for almost nothing because of $250K in student loans, which means they must have the money. Their sad revenue streams are likely to take hits.

I’m not mocking the plight of today’s 20something, attempting to navigate a world in which their elders ate up the whole buffet. (I’ve been cussing those elders for it since our twenties during the Reagan administration. They ignored me. Still do.) I’m only mocking the lazy ones with low to no standards or pride, or who assert for themselves unreasonable qualifications. I am making the point that for those who want to loaf their way by, and who feel better about doing that and then playing Galaxy of Mortal Annihilationcraft: Total & Utter Eternal Damnation & Destruction all day, AI is not merely the crutch. It is more the self-driving vehicle.

Would I use AI to help me edit material people paid me to work on? You can guess that answer. I doubt that anyone who does would ever admit it, so you can believe me or not. Those who know me well have no trouble taking it at face value. But in case anyone needs to hear it, I would sooner make homebrew napalm and drop flaming globs of it on my body.

Would I reject working on a novel partly or wholly written by AI? It’s unlikely I will ever see one, because those who don’t want to write (but want the appearance of having done so) are unlikely to want to spend money. A part of me can see that. To them, what the AI wrote is grammatically okay, and isn’t that the only use for a damn editor anyway? I’m not going to pierce that perception and won’t try. It’s unlikely they understand the breadth of my work, but that’s okay; in most cases I think they’d be shocked to hear that it costs more than $300 to “put an edit on it.” (That could be one of the most unpalatable and ignorant turns of phrase I ever encounter. Take it from me: Anyone using it knows little about actual editing.) Thus, I’m not their target vendor and I’m not that vendor’s competition. You all have fun.

Is there a place for AI in the work of writers I respect? That depends on what they are writing about. In non-fiction, such as (stop laughing) business reporting, I can see at least reasons to think of letting it handle a first draft. I think this because business reporting is not a passion project, and the live workforce every year is demanded to do more–with less people, in less time, for less compensation. A first draft can also be edited, reviewed, and its odder fancies corrected by someone who could have written that were they given the time to do so. There is a canyon separating those who can’t actually do it themselves in a competent way, and those who could but for life circumstances (deadlines, kids, delusional boss) eroding their time and mindshare. Those who could have done it themselves can certainly spot and correct flawed material. I get it.

As for ‘lancers, the market that wants to write its own words and hire a real editor will continue to do so, because it values the journey and the education at least as much as it does the outcome. Those are my market. Them I can help. They are why I keep doing this.

Am I concerned about AI? I wouldn’t need to be, except for the climate that made it acceptable. I am much more concerned about the decline of literacy, attention spans, and critical thinking in that climate than I am about AI itself.

After all, I obviously didn’t mind it when it was trying to give me stress trying not to get my experienced Panther crews blown to hell in Steel Panthers by US P-47Ds firing 5″ rockets, or when it was helping me look up why my stupid fitness watch wouldn’t pair. I only started taking a leak on it when it started moneylending in my temple. And when that came, it was time to get to work on scourging.

I had heard about this, but did not imagine I would encounter it from a highly literate, educated person. How naïf I can be.

All right. Time to stand our ground.

The word on the editorial street is that some people have decided the em dash* (the longest dash we use; —) is associated with AI writing. It seems some fairly non-thinking people have darted from basic notice of that computer-generated habit to: “OMG never use an em dash, or they’ll think you used AI.”

Poppycock, horseshit, baloney, and a load of crap. Furthermore, the stance of a writer showing minimal confidence in their craft.

Details:

While I will go to war with cheerful ruthlessness to eradicate overuse of the em dash, it’s a valid and useful part of the language. I will not stand still while people throw it away because they heard that someone who doesn’t know much about writing might think negative things about their writing because they saw an em dash. No. Stand up and fight. You are ceding this ground to AI, which is not a person and has no rights.
Who so greatly cares about fairly slow people’s evaluations of their writing that they will trash a helpful device just in case the slow people might think a naughty thought about them? Don’t spend so much time caring what knee-jerk critics have to say. Spend more time caring how well you are communicating with your chosen audience. (Although I guess that if your audience is dumb, maybe you better abjure the symbol so you don’t act upon them like the doctor’s little rubber hammer.)
AI will evolve, improve. Think its makers haven’t heard about the em dash hyperdependence tell? Perhaps you underestimate them. It won’t be this way for long. While they are busy trying to make AI writing less stupid—and we can expect them to succeed by degrees—they’ll also start throttling back the tells. The em dash will be among them. Em dashes were not invented by AI; they were here long before the computer.
If you write better than AI, it follows that people will realize you wrote it yourself and have some modest chops.

This sort of little ad hoc rule is no more than another form of conformity. Not a fan. All my life I have watched herds of non-thinking people let the world dictate to them the obligatory current views. The thinking people didn’t ask anyone’s permission to have viewpoints, nor did they ask for approval except perhaps from their educational and intellectual peers. I have seen fad after fad, trend after trend, come and go and fade into memory. All represented voluntary conformity for the sake of conformity, which is perhaps the filthiest language I have used in a month.

Nonconformism neen’t be stupid. Conform because a conforming act makes independent sense? Certainly. Conform because power has a weapon pointed at you? Very well; they can order you to obey but they can’t have your soul. Conform because you need to keep a job? Fine; work isn’t a place to be yourself, and one is a fool or a saint to think so. But conform for the sake of wanting to be like others, to receive gang approval, strokes from bullies who would be gutless without someone to tell them what they think? Give away your soul for the sake of a fickle approbation? Throw away a useful piece of punctuation for fear of what others might think?

Not sure whether I react more with contempt or pity.

Now let’s edit/writing coach like we mean it. Em dashes are a useful part of the language. Used in excess, they are bad writing, a lazy crutch to avoid recasts. The same is true of ellipses, italicized emphasis, adverbs, passive voice and other deprecated-but-not-rejected options that too easily become bad habits. Be judicious, save the tool for when it pays its way, and you are in control of your writing. Be lazy—use the tool because it’s so much easier than quality writing—and you’ll hear about it the first time you show your work to a competent editor.

If you want to stress over something related to AI, try focusing the energy on being a better writer than an algorithm. That’s more productive than placating people who don’t write as well as does an algorithm.

*Why the hell are we calling it that? The em dash is so called for typesetting reasons that no longer bear resemblance to the way contemporary printing occurs. It’s supposed to be the width of an m; the en dash an n, and the hyphen: —, –, -.

The Editorial Maverick

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Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.