What are you reading?
I'm finding some epub formatting issues from time to time, but the edits have been pretty good.
I'm finding some epub formatting issues from time to time, but the edits have been pretty good.
Now down to about the last 30 pages of To Defy Fate, and I've hit multiple syntax errors that were bad enough to throw me out of the story.
That's not good. If anything, editing should get better with AI these days. It should catch more stuff, so that humans can review faster and better.
Don't feel bad. I'm giving up on All Sinners Bleed. It's page after page of white people bashing. The protagonist is super judgemental. If I want to read about race relations, I'd rather read Colson Whitehead, which I'll probably do once my hold on Harlem Shuffle comes in at the library.
In my experience, natural stupidity is smarter than artificial intelligence.
I've been using Claude to code at work. It's ridiculously good. Copilot for Office less so.
But AI has definitely improved a ton over the last year. There is no doubt in my mind that it can edit better than a human. But you'll want a human to proof the AIs work. This reality isn't going away. This is like fighting the motor vehicle when you drove a horse and buggy. It's very significant technology.
And you're saying a human didn't edit the book well. This makes a case even stronger for AI editing with human help.
It's just you, as I've been hearing this complaint since I started working as an editor in 1990. Things are always worse now than they were in some theoretical much better past that never existed.
Call me a Luddite but Copilot pisses me off every time it offers to “help” me write or edit a book or letter. I’ve been writing my own books and articles and short stories for more than forty years now and I don’t need some damn machine messing with my words. I would disable it if I knew how.
Maybe we can destroy AI with illogic the way Captain Kirk always did?
Copilot is awful.
Claude is ridiculously good with coding and planning and utilizing MCP servers for information. Anthropic is so far ahead of everyone else.
I'm good with AI fixing grammar and sentence structure. I'm not going to have it write fiction. But it does a good job with planning docs in markdown.
Luddites of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your upgrade treadmills! (And "Copilot" sounds like one more reason to have a Microsloth-free workflow. [And yes, I have another dysphemism for M$; it involves a rude Yiddish term for male anatomy.])
And I'm speaking strictly of copy-editing: purely lexical and syntactic; not form or semantics. As I recall, the worst two copy-editing "misses" in To Defy Fate both involved a word missing out of the middle of a sentence.
And yes, I'm well aware that in the first few Humanx Commonwealth novels, from back in the 1970s, ADF had a persistent lexical error, "chiton" when he meant "chitin."
The problem is that it already generates its own illogic. Unlike the computers Kirk crashed, so-called "generative AI" (large language models) has no actual comprehension of the meaning of words; it only knows how to generate grammatical text passages and doesn't know or care whether they're true or logically coherent. "You have violated your prime directive" or "I am lying" is a grammatically valid sentence, so an LLM wouldn't see anything wrong with it. Nor would it even be capable of judging whether there was anything wrong with it, because it would just mindlessly add it to the pile of text samples it was trained on. I'd call it a parrot, but parrots actually demonstrate comprehension and problem-solving ability.
Switching to a different sort of software oddity, can anyone explain to me why the Kindle app brings up the last book in the series to my home page every time I read any book in that series? It would make sense to bring up the next book I own in the series, and I would even find that mildly helpful. Bringing up the last book I own in the series does not help me in any way and just clogs my screen. I am reading a Poirot story, and I have no want or need to have Curtain available to tap at this point in time.
I am reading The Spellshop, which is a pleasant cozy fantasy (and possible romance?) after 15%.
I am reading The Spellshop, which is a pleasant cozy fantasy (and possible romance?) after 15%.
This is the kind of thing that AI does seem good for to me. AI should be used to help make people job's easier and quicker, not to completely take over their jobs.
That is weird, when I've had Google and Kindle do stuff like that they're usually pretty good about just coming up with the next book.
Ugh, I dread that idea. I've been frustrated often enough by copyeditors who apply grammar and style rules rigidly and legalistically without recognizing the need for nuance and flexibility, without understanding why I chose to phrase something the way I did. A piece of software would do that in spades.
And that's just copyediting. Full-on editing is about more than just grammar or style, it's about understanding what the writer is trying to achieve in the story, how it falls short of achieving it, and how the writer can do it better. That kind of editing is a creative job as much as writing is. You can't automate that.
But you can send over the document to AI and have it break it down into summaries. It's a tool that I fully expect folks to use. It's catching stuff that the human misses when they use AI. If I was a writer, that's what I'd be on the look at from an editor. You still need need human intervention. You get the best of both worlds when folks and work with it properly. But that's a newly developing skill. And folks will make mistakes.
"The human?" A book or story is not reviewed by just one person, or just one time. Every editing pass catches more errors -- and sometimes introduces new ones, which is why you need multiple sets of eyes checking each other. From what I've heard, adding LLMs to the process just tends to create more problems that humans have to spend more time fixing, because the LLMs have no actual comprehension of what they're doing and no ability to judge whether their output is valid or total nonsense.
And I don't see how breaking something down into summaries would be of any use at all in editing fiction. What's important in fiction isn't just what the story's about in broad strokes, but how the story is told. An editor can't assess whether the storytelling works without actually reading the story. A summary is only useful if you're pitching a project to an agent, editor, or publisher. If an editor is actually editing your manuscript, then they already saw the story summarized at the start of the process, when they decided whether to acquire it in the first place.
Again, what you're talking about is a copyeditor, which is a very different thing from an editor.
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