On editing…
May 20th, 2025 | Ramblings
A number of people were unhappy with the editing of”I Never Applied for this Job”. I sent it out to a half dozen beta readers and still had quite a few errors returned after publishing. In the past I’ve paid $1k for professional editing and didn’t get as clean a copy as volunteer readers. I also used Grammarly with so-so results. That ended after a Windows update stopped it working for me. A couple of days ago, I loaded Grammarly again, and not only does it work again, it seems to be improved. I’d applied it to my last two books, mostly getting changes of punctuation. I’m looking forward to applying it BEFORE sending out the next book to readers.
Makes me wonder how well (or horribly badly) an AI would do proofreading. I’ve never gotten far enough into AI to have any kind of feel for its abilities or lack of them.
I think it would probably do well for spelling and grammar, while utterly mangling the content and meaning of the sentence.
I could be wrong, there’s a difference between an AI trained for editing and a generative AI like ChatGPT.
Either way I don’t think the technology is there yet, since the book would still need to be proofread and edited for anything it missed and/or mangled.
So far constraining the AI to NOT mess with the text and just do grammar is a problem. AI will screw it up as you have to feed it so much information it’s near worthless. This is for the free junk online.
An example is M$ and clippy levels of stupid but it’s active artificial stupid.
Grammarly should be able to work around this with custom rules, fences and in some cases live corrections which they should be slowly working on.
Grammarly does some stupid stuff, but it calls your attention to possible problems. My English skills are poor enough that, like Mick says, it has to be really bad before I see it’s a problem. If I have alerts and choices I’m much better off than trying to see errors myself. I’d be surprised if they can ever have software you just tell to correct it without checking it item by item.
I do NOT care about eiditing. All I’m interested in is the story.
Nice to see ya Mick.
I just want the story. Even books that are traditionally published by well known publishers still have typos.
Funny to pretty much agree with all the comments so far.
Possibly I am a Luddite but I would be really careful with an AI unless it was like a really good text editor showing clearly before and after.
It’s not really AI. It’s along the lines of another scifi authors epithet Artificial Stupid. It’s would be fabulous in someway but overal IQ is around 50. It’s easily befuddled and does weird stuff.
Fire one up at home and feed it all the garbage on your harddrives. Go play. I do mean ALL of it. 🙂
I am not responsible for hexapodal catgirls. You spay or neuter them yourself.
The only thing I didn’t like about the book was that it ended, and I have to wait how long for the next one. I did send it a few typos when I was reading, but certainly not enough to detract from it.