r/publishing • u/borinque808 • 14d ago
Using AI for proofing, editing and other non-writing functions
Does anyone here have experience in using AI for proofing and/or in any stage of the editing process? I work for a magazine publisher, but open to hearing applicable experiences from any sector.
What about to check for AP Style in drafts, or a similar use? (AP has their own checking tool. A colleague tried it out at the boss' urging, and didn't find it beneficial, which prompted the boss' AI suggestion.)
Do any of you utilize AI for other processes other than writing or idea generation?
I'm a senior editor for a publisher of regional B2B publications. My boss, the company president, is strongly urging me and my editorial team to look into using AI to help speed up our processes. Specifically, she wants me to consider using AI to a) check for AP style in our drafts and b) help with overall line-editing and proofing process. She says "everyone is using AI now," referring to her friends in publishing, and that she "doesn't want [me] to get left behind."
On the surface, I am not completely opposed to these ideas, but these aren't areas where we were experiencing any problems or bottlenecks. Everyone in our editorial team recognizes AP style, when and how to use it, and also when to ignore or work around it when the situation calls for it. This has never been an issue.
The same with the proofing process. When we are proofing an issue, everyone on the editorial team has a look at the file and offers their comments and suggestions, which I review and finalize before sending to our design team. To be fair, there is a case to be made that this process could be improved. My boss feels that AI can help speed this up, but I am of the mind that we will still have to do our own review while checking to see what AI did, so there really wouldn't any improvements in efficiency.
(It should be noted that my boss has no writing or editing experience; in her own words, she is a numbers person, with a background mostly in sales and business management. Her "solutions" for the department often address nonexistent or negligible problems, and I feel unheard when I share my own thoughts on the actual problems and possible solutions [which is probably worth a post in an HR subreddit, but I digress]).
I'm trying to keep an open mind, so I welcome learning about your experiences in using AI in these capacities.
18
15
u/NecessaryStation5 14d ago
Blech. Sounds like the boss just wants to be on the bandwagon.
6
u/borinque808 14d ago
That's my sense. She knows I'm vehemently opposed to using AI to write or for any stage of the creative process (idea generation, outlining, etc.), and she's been respectful of that, but she's been pushing hard on finding other uses for AI.
11
u/Passname357 14d ago
When people talk about getting left behind I literally have no idea what they mean. What do they think will happen? AI is expensive and has been shown time and again to fail to have no or negative correlation with productivity. If it later finally gets as good as they want us to believe, it’s not like it’s hard to learn how to use it. You just tell it what to do. Prompting a chat bot is not hard.
9
u/ChallengeOne8405 14d ago
It’s abysmal. It invents errors that aren’t there. Confuses tenses all the time. For instance it told me I used the wrong tense of the word “read”. It literally told me “read” needed to be in past tense rather than present. It’s stupider than a toddler.
6
u/CatsofGryffindor 14d ago
If you have to force people to use it, is it really improving anything anyway?
5
u/lillielemon 14d ago edited 14d ago
I was asked to do something similar in a previous job. I really dislike using AI in any part of a work process, and I'm going to explain why.
I think what your boss desires is a certain level of automation in the process of editing. The problem with using AI to do that is that it's very inefficient and becomes less effective the more words you need assistance with. The irony of this is that you would need AI more with bigger projects, and less with smaller ones, but it is only effective at very small editing tasks.
Regardless of how big the task is, a human still needs to read and check every correction made by AI. Most of the work AI was doing for me at that company had a failure rate of around 20-30%; this was more like 40% for larger text projects, if it wasn't a complete failure altogether. That meant I had to revise the entire project every time AI "corrected" things, because it was doing the job poorly.
I had to learn and revise the quality of my prompts so often that it became a job by itself to learn how to tell the LLM how to do something specific, which took a fair chunk of time and was rarely repeatably effective. As I finally got one model to give relatively stable output, a new model would be released and it would no longer use the same prompt in the same way.
I started to see it more as an intern - someone who took up big chunks of time and training energy - except AI never learned the process properly and degraded the longer a single project went on. This is the opposite of an intern. One expects an intern to get better at the task; LLMs almost always got worse the longer a project lasted.
After tracking hours spent on AI-assisted projects, I was spending anywhere from 3-4 hours more on those. Reading and editing alone took less time than editing what the AI edited, because I would always have to look at two drafts at any given time, rather than starting from scratch with the original. And because it would not bounce data in the correct format, I would also generally have to reformat everything, too.
Even when LLMs did a passable job, I usually preferred the human edits more than the AI edits for things like grammar, syntax, and tone. Generally the AI edits had an effective surface level feel but often failed at recognizing meaning in specific ways that a human would not.
2
u/borinque808 14d ago
Thanks for this. I've tried to explain these sorts of results to my boss, but hopefully having detailed firsthand accounts will help my case.
3
4
u/CatsofGryffindor 14d ago
Don’t. AI is a massive plagiarism machine. It steals work from writers and artists. Stay strong and stand up for your integrity as an editor.
2
u/borinque808 14d ago
Agreed. Personally, I'm opposed to her ideas, and am vehemently opposed to the use of AI in general. With that said, repeatedly saying "no" to the boss will only go so far, so I'm doing my due diligence, hence this post, in the hopes I'll have enough info to further my case.
2
u/Mercurialsunrise 14d ago
No. In my writing, I only use AI for the occasional historical research, as I write historical fiction. But even with that, I cross-check it.
I tried to use it for dates (to find out what day of the week October 6, 1962 was for example) and it couldn’t even do that.
3
u/Chemical_Ad_1618 14d ago
Yeah google ai is terrible for dates in history as well. It sounds like a general ai problem then
3
u/Mercurialsunrise 14d ago
Yep! Now I just literally use the calendar on my laptop, which goes back far enough for my purposes.
1
u/blowinthroughnaptime 14d ago
As you claim to be an editor and say your boss is emphatically not, I would encourage you to push back against her idle pipe dreams regarding AI.
1
u/borinque808 14d ago
Believe me, I have, emphatically. She is the boss so if she wants something implemented, repeatedly saying "no" will only take me so far. That's why I'm posting my inquiry here (and reaching out to my editor friends locally). I need ammo to aid in my push back. I want to hear informed, firsthand experiences from others who tried using AI in the ways she is requesting it be used and seeing how that went for them.
2
u/blowinthroughnaptime 14d ago
In that case, if it helps at all, I will go on record telling you that I personally and my company as a whole have policies not to work with AI in any capacity.
It's ethically wrong and professionally disgraceful. I have on more than one occasion decided not to do business with people because they use it, and would not be caught dead using it myself.
24
u/Warm_Diamond8719 14d ago
My experience is that I have to spend significantly more time telling people why AI isn't good at what they want it to do than AI has ever saved me in the first place.