Human Editors Are Hands Down Better than AI for Every Aspect of The Writing Process

Almost all the editing inquiries I’ve been getting these days have been written or edited by AI and I’ve reached my limit in being able to work with this material. I gave it a chance because I wanted to get to know what people were using it for and in what ways. I also respect the positive intentions of many people who are trying to write without much experience or skill. The AI tools seem to give them the confidence to get their story out there or to offer some important wisdom they’ve gained from experience. It was nice that basic issues like spelling and grammar were already clean and the language clear. From one perspective it was “good” writing.

But it didn’t take long to feel the patterns the AI was using and to realize they were the same in everything I was reading. Short, pithy sentences, repetitive vocabulary, negative comparison (It’s not this, it’s that), lists, cliches, groups of three, too many commas, excessive polish, a certain rhythm and cadence that makes everyone’s writing sound the same, and so on. It’s one artificial voice showing up in everyone’s writing, in websites, emails, newsletters, blogs, articles, essays, and even the “creative” writing and earnest attempts at memoir of too many people who really do think that somehow this is their own voice. It started to hurt my brain. And it makes me sad.

What I want to say to any and all writers is: Just use your own voice. Your voice is good enough. Messiness and even lack of certain skills in writing are ok.

It is far easier to edit messy writing with tons of grammatical errors, punctuation confusion, poor choices of words, and other issues than it is to try to wrestle any semblance of authentic language and voice out of AI-assisted writing. It is also far more pleasant to read someone’s quirky voice, eccentric syntax, poor spelling, or slightly disorganized thinking than it is to read that one auto-generated voice saying almost the same things in the same way over and over about any given subject. How can a book about overcoming addiction sound the same as a book about Mary Magdalene which sounds the same as a book about economic inequity which sounds the same as an article about dog training? This is not coincidence.

These days I think anyone with the courage to write in nothing but their own words is fighting the good fight. We human editors are here to help you use your own voice to offer value and be of benefit to the world. In my humble opinion, real beauty and value come from the genuine messiness and heartbreak of being a person navigating the crazy labyrinth of life to the best of our abilities. Our writing is a way to share that experience and should therefore reverberate with our genuine, unique human voices, sometimes breaking or stuttering or being too intense or not even making sense but trying to do so with all our heart. Doing our best and a little bit better over and over creates something no AI-assisted action can duplicate.

Of course, one of the most important ways to develop a writing voice is to read and write a lot. But if we are not reading a wide variety of voices, if all we are reading has already been generated or smoothed out by AI, we will never know anything about the magic of real writing and reading. Reading books from different time periods and places reveals that language itself evolves all the time as do writing conventions. These changes occur because of minute, organic, place-based, experience-based interactions of human beings. Language is alive. It is impermanent, recreated moment to moment in infinite variety, and it decays. It’s like plant life and soil, fallen leaves and worms, castles and crumbling ruins, sheet metal shanty-towns filled with joy. Language reveals us to ourselves, the tenuous nature of our survival brimming with the mysterious fact of our existence. It only makes sense when we feel the unique truth underlying what is being said—unique because it comes from a real person on the other end, no matter how ordinary. If the words are pretty but there isn’t anyone behind it, it has no beauty and it robs us of the necessity to articulate for ourselves.

A good editor can sense the human inside the writing. Their experience and skill are important, but equally important is their capacity to relate to your message and your voice—to you, to the reality behind and beneath the words. Their job is to notice anything that gets in the way of your real voice coming through. Sometimes the obstacle is poor grammar or wordiness or improper punctuation and so on, but that is not all there is to it. And that’s all machine learning can do—follow algorithms and apply rules, patterns, conventions, and predictions. Machine learning can’t feel you or hear your voice, the trembling behind it, the music inside it, the intention behind the words not quite finding its way out. It can’t intuitively sense that breaking certain rules or conventions in specific ways might create just the right effect in a given piece of writing, or might unlock the rhythm or tone in a way that works for what a writer is trying to do. Machines can’t sense into and understand who you are and what you are trying to say because they don’t have a human experience.

That’s what human editors are for. They are not all equally skilled at this. Some editors are more like machines. But human editors are still, hands down, better than AI at supporting you in your writing process every step of the way.

I’ll leave it at that for now. God bless us, everyone