Why AI can't replace Human Editors

Hire a human editor if you care about quality writing

As creatives, a lot of us are worried about AI stealing everything from us: jobs, art,writing, editing. While this may happen to some extent, there is a hill I will always stand on: AI can not replace a human editor if you care about clear and quality writing.

Don’t get me wrong, companies and people who want to produce large quantities of content fast and cheap will continue to replace artists, writers, editors, and marketers with AI in the short term. All to make a larger profit.

But their quality and reputation will be damaged. AI slop is not and will never be as good as actual human creativity.

Photo Credit: Brett Jordan on Unsplash

---

Spell Check is Worse Now

Let me tell you a story.

In the editing world, I’ve noticed a number of editors complaining about Microsoft Word, the industry standard word processing program. All the new updates are causing things to break, from comments to tracked changes to spell-check.

Want to guess why?

It’s because of AI. The more these companies try to shove AI into everything, the worse things get. The final form of online and tech enshitifcation.

I personally don’t use Microsoft Word; I use it’s open-source equivalent, Libre Office. Similar features, good compatibility, and most importantly, no AI. Because I decided I was fed up and exhausted with it all.

Speaking of AI making spell check worse, have you experienced this?

You write something and run it through some grammar checker: Grammarly, Google Docs, Microsoft Word. But the suggestions it gives back to you are strange.

The grammar checker wants you to change a verb agreement with the noun that makes no sense. Or maybe it gives you a word that isn’t a word, or ignores a misspelled word because it thinks it’s correct.

You go through and hit ignore, but these suggestions pop up every single time. It becomes annoying.

This is because Generative AI, or LLMs, can not understand context, grammar rules, or authorial style. So any grammar checker that is running generative AI on your work, is going to get a whole lot wrong.

LLMs guess at the next possible word based on statistics.

You know that thing your phone keyboard has that you can click on where it guesses the next word and makes funny sentences. That’s what generative AI does on a larger scale.

It can’t edit your sentences. It can’t understand the context of a subject-verb agreement in the sentence. So it gets it wrong.

Now imagine you’re in a rush. You just need to get your essay turned in, the blog post up, the book published.

So you accept any and all suggestions without looking. You trust Grammarly to edit your work. You trust Chat GPT to rewrite what you have.

You’re in a rush so you don’t bother to look it over.

And you end up with messy, AI-slop. People struggle to understand what you wrote, or maybe they stop reading entirely.

---

Hire A Human Editor

This is why human editors are so important. It’s why hiring a human editor can make a huge difference in having clear, quality work with well-written sentences.

I can understand context. I can look up grammar rules. I can think critically about an author’s voice or style or message and make decisions.

It’s why I’m not worried about being entirely replaced by AI. There will always be people who DO care about quality writing. There will always be authors who hate AI.

So here’s my message for writers: Hire a human editor and ditch the AI slop.

Eventually, I believe publishing companies and media companies will understand.

Their audience will stop reading or watching. They will boycott companies, stop buying in. The AI slop will get worse until finally, the bubble bursts and companies admit they’re losing money by the billions over this tech.

This may take time. And it’s going to be very rough in the meantime, many people are going to suffer.

To any artists, writers, editors, and marketers out there impacted by this, I see you. I feel you. I understand the pain and the struggle.

But know that I don’t think it will always be like this. I think many, many people will come to understand that human art, creativity, and judgment matters.

And for now, advertise as much as you can that you don’t use and will never use AI in anything you do. Because there are plenty of people out there who will support you. That agree with you and want to read your writing, your stories. They want to see your art, your videos, your photography.

Because human creativity still matters to so many people. Don’t let corporations ruin your love for art and make you hopeless for a better future.

---

Otters Editing

If you’re an author who needs an editor that doesn’t use AI, please support me by checking out Otters Editing.

I believe that you deserve an editor who wants to protect your writing from Generative AI training. I believe you deserve an editor that cares about the value of human storytelling and will respect your manuscript.

If you liked this post, let me know by leaving a comment or contacting me! I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.