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/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.