Should We Fear the Rise of AI Editing?

The first time you see an artificial intelligence (AI) product like ChatGPT take on an editing task, its suggestions will amaze you. Its editing is impressive.

Then the fear sets in.

If a computer can do this, who needs people? If you’re an editor, it’s hard to look at what AI can do and not ask yourself existential questions. At Intelligent Editing, our customers are all language professionals who work with words. If AI takes their jobs, then ours will disappear too. We felt the exact same fear.

That moment of existential threat doesn’t last. As you dive a little deeper into AI editing, you quickly see that while AI editing applications may get it right 75% of the time, they also make a lot of mistakes. And some of their mistakes would be catastrophic if they made it into the text.

And that’s not even the biggest failing of AI editing!

The biggest problem is that AI can’t respect the author’s voice. Angus Johnston showed how bad it can get by asking ChatGPT to edit George Orwell.

Johnston explains, “Every change ChatGPT made is defensible on grammatical/usage grounds. Every single one makes Orwell’s writing worse.” A tool that seems so impressive at first, fundamentally misses what makes a copyeditor valuable. AI is certainly not a replacement for a copyeditor.

What Does AI Really Mean for Editing?

If AI is both extremely capable most of the time and ridiculously wrong some of the time, and if AI doesn’t get the author’s voice, what does it mean for editing as a profession?

It helps to consider other technological innovations that are used in the sector. Spell check and grammar check didn’t put editors out of business. PerfectIt hasn’t led to editors losing their jobs. With that in mind, a less alarmist framework helps. We can consider these tools as either augmented intelligence or assistive intelligence. These are explained below.

Augmented Intelligence

Augmented intelligence supports human decisions. Augmented intelligence products are set up to support human working. It emphasizes the collaboration between humans and machines, leveraging AI algorithms and technologies to augment human abilities rather than replacing them. The approach focuses on empowering humans with AI tools, allowing them to assess vast amounts of data, make informed decisions, and perform tasks more efficiently. Within the realm of editing, you can see this in PerfectIt in the way it analyses a long text but brings just the inconsistencies to the attention of an editor.

Assistive Intelligence

Assistive intelligence automates simple tasks. The focus is on the use of AI systems to provide direct assistance and support to humans in specific tasks or domains. It aims to enhance human performance by leveraging AI capabilities. Although it requires constant input from human users, it frees up time to focus on more difficult parts of the task. Advances in AI start to make this possible for language professionals. But the flaws in AI editing present a challenge. A human editor can work with an assistive intelligence to dismiss occasional bad suggestions. However, AI’s understanding of the author’s voice is so poor that this approach isn’t helpful at the copyediting stage of document production.

The Paradox of AI Editing

What does all of this mean in practice?

It seems there is a paradox of AI editing. The better shape a text is in, the less ChatGPT can help edit that text. The paradox is so strong, that as a text improves and starts to be ready for a human editor, ChatGPT’s suggestions can make things worse.

That’s why when we designed a tool for AI editing, we aimed at a completely different part of the document creation process. We built Draftsmith for the writing refinement stage because that’s where AI can help more. It’s only designed for copyediting in situations where the text needs an extensive edit (such as when it’s written by an EAL author).

What’s (Truly) New?

We created Draftsmith to give language professionals access to the best that AI editing can offer. If you think that’s the end of the craft of editing, we encourage you to take a closer look. You’ll find a tool that’s designed to save time earlier in the document creation process. On the contrary, our belief is that the rise of generative AI will mean there are more documents that need the type of attention that only a copyeditor can provide.

The more you look at AI editing tools, the more it will convince you of one thing more than anything else. Editing is a human profession and it always will be. This is one area of work in which the AI overlords will not be able to replace people!