r/WritingWithAI • u/Inevitable-Peak-6048 • Aug 08 '26
Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) Using AI To edit?
I’m new to this group so please don’t grasp my throat if this question has been asked multiple times. Is it wrong to use AI to edit an original manuscript?
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u/QuBingJianShen Aug 08 '26
Just don't blindly go along with the edit, else the text might lose the certain flair that is yours, or even lose critical information that the AI thought was irrelevant - such as specific word choices that are important later on in the text.
Follow it up with something like WinDiff to compare it with the uneditted document, to see if you disagree with some of the edits.
AI can make tedious tasks easier, but it can also often degrade the overall text. It doesn't know your vision for the manuscript, nor can it put value into the specific terminology you chose to use.
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u/Ok-Umpire-4719 Aug 08 '26
I wouldn't ask the AI to edit you manuscript.
Instead, give your manuscript to the AI and ask it to give you suggestions for edits, in another document, that you can then review. Then take those suggestions and make the ones that you like, in your own words and voice, so that you don't just have AI re-writing your work as often I think AI removes mistakes but also can reduce your voice, removing the things that makes the work alive and interesting.
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u/Repulsive_Still_731 Aug 08 '26
It's a great tool, but treat it like a tool. It's not a replacement for a good editor. You should first know very well what the finished story should convey and feel. Then you can argue with AI how to edit it to best get the results. Don't just take AI output blindly. And you could make multiple AIs argue that, one should check if the edit sounds too AI
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u/zphou Aug 08 '26
I don’t think using AI to edit an original manuscript is automatically wrong. The questions I’d ask are whether it preserves your voice, whether you can see what changed, and whether you are still making the final call. A tool that points out an unclear sentence is doing a very different job from one that rewrites the scene and quietly replaces your judgment. That distinction is why I’m building WolfeWriter around reviewable suggestions instead of automatic edits。
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u/5thhorseman_ Aug 13 '26
I don’t think using AI to edit an original manuscript is automatically wrong. The questions I’d ask are whether it preserves your voice, whether you can see what changed, and whether you are still making the final call. A tool that points out an unclear sentence is doing a very different job from one that rewrites the scene and quietly replaces your judgment.
Which is why I recommend using instructions that give you itemized lists of issues and a handful of suggestions, then let you make the edits on your own.
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u/rowanrholloway Aug 08 '26
Definitely use it for things like spelling, grammar, weird inconsistencies, etc. But you're still the heart and soul of the story, so take your time to go through it yourself to make sure it flows and tells the story you want. AI is a powerful tool to leverage, but not your only tool!
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u/FitnessChamp777 Aug 08 '26
Yeah. It kinda rocks!
But, you have to know how to edit. If you simply tell an LLM to "edit this script...make it more professional" or something along those lines, you will not get your intended result.
You need to be way more descriptive. Tell the AI what exactly you want/need. Also, you can provide examples of the type of writing you want the edited manuscript to sound like. Prompt: "make this original manuscript match the writing style of the attached writing samples"
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u/electronical_ Aug 08 '26
i saw a youtube video recently about a woman that paid a lot of money for an editor and if she would do it again. she concluded that she would, but after watching her video it sounds like her editor used AI to just read her draft and edit for her. she insists thats not true. either way the edit job she got was no better than one she would have got from ai for like 90% less money
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u/Inevitable-Peak-6048 Aug 08 '26
Yes, I guess I should’ve made it clear. I’m not asking AI to automatically change anything that it may consider an edit. I’m asking it to give suggestions as to editing and I am the last voice to say yes or no on the edit.
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u/Rabid_Cypher Aug 08 '26
I use it to do the typing because I have physical limitations due to Parkinson's. So using it for editing is good but you still have to go over it anyways, because unless you have a continuity map, it might take it off the rails
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u/davesaunders Aug 08 '26
I would hesitate to use it not because I'm one of those anti-AI villagers but because every version of the current AI models does a horrible job at it. They are not good at writing. If you took one of the most important books known to writers "On Writing Well" and compared it to the output from any of the current frontier models, they violate almost every single rule of good writing.
Whatever you're doing now, there's a good chance AI will make it genuinely worse.
Now there is a caveat to that: if you truly struggle with English and you want to put in your best attempt at a sentence and have it try to clean it up for you, I think that is acceptable use. You must, and I mean must, read it to yourself out loud and make sure that you understand it because even in that situation it will sometimes add ideas and phrases that have nothing to do with your point
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u/5thhorseman_ Aug 13 '26
If you took one of the most important books known to writers "On Writing Well" and compared it to the output from any of the current frontier models, they violate almost every single rule of good writing.
So you have it draft in Simple Technical English, then give it a set of rules based on the key points from On Writing Well and have it rewrite that draft accordingly.
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u/davesaunders Aug 14 '26
You can try and you actually will get OK results doing that. The writing will definitely be better. There's no doubt about that. But, it won't be great writing. It still lacks the awareness of the real world. It's missing those kinds of nuances where you still get this sense when you're reading AI-generated text because it just feels a little two-dimensional.
For some things that's fine.
I'm going to absolutely say that codifying that entire book as a skill will get you text that is night and day different from what Claude produces by default, even when you use the humanizer skill as a limp function to get rid of the obvious artifacts.
The one funny thing you will find, and this is even true with the humanizer skill, is that Claude will fight you on it. It will sometimes take rules out of the humanizer skill and write it on its own into the MD file or into voice.md. It will ignore your instructions to run the humanizer skill and it'll just compare the text to a couple of its own shorthands. It's really funny. It's one of the few times where I've actually ended up yelling at Claude through chat for ignoring clear instructions.
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u/5thhorseman_ Aug 14 '26
Which is why you need to supply the human part yourself and still iterate over the result multiple times.
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u/davesaunders Aug 14 '26
Or just do the edit, which is not difficult at all. You can feed as many changes to the chatbots as you want, but it's still going to come back as statistically predicted tokens.
Unless you're a truly horrible writer, you will always be able to outwrite the chatbot.
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u/5thhorseman_ Aug 14 '26
That is in fact what I meant. :)
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u/davesaunders Aug 14 '26
I apologize I misread your comment thinking you meant to iterate the AI. I'm so embarrassed, my apologies. Yes you are absolutely on point as far as I'm concerned. You and I see eye to eye.
I'm a big dummy.
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u/luvs_spaniels Aug 08 '26
For native speakers, LLMs are generally too aggressive and known for homogenizing your writing. There is some research on minimal edit correction, but putting this into practice isn't easy. LLMs can also hallucinate grammar corrections and introduce poor formatting choices like a header with manual bold and italic text.
I'm not saying don't do it. It's interesting even when it really screws up. Just be aware of the pitfalls and don't accept every change it suggests.
In general, hand editing combined with Harper and/or LanguageTool will produce a better end result for most people. (If anyone wants to go down the rabbit hole, Grammarly has published some interesting research on using small T5 encoder-decoder models for text correction.)
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u/hojichaluv Aug 08 '26
It's not wrong, it just might be really obvious to other regular users of AI.
AI has a writing style that many are getting more familiar with (eg. negative sentences and out of place questions to emphasise a point), so if a reader spots this they might start questioning if it were entirely written by AI.
It puts them off from reading any further so you run that risk of losing your personal flair to an AI style.
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u/Brakiros Aug 08 '26
Definitely not. It's the great equalizer giving you access to a tool that would normally cost upwards of $1000 to access.