My Statement About Providing Editing Services for Manuscripts Written by AI
This is a living document, and I am open to having dialogues about this issue.
The first time I was sent a manuscript to edit that was written significantly by AI, I was so confused by what I was reading. On the one hand, the writing used the same sentence structures over and over again and were full of generalisms that didn’t actually say anything; I was reading more or less the same sentiment again and again in varying ways. On the other hand, the punctuation was flawless. These two things don’t usually go together. People who don’t know how to write usually don’t know how to use punctuation either. (This was only a couple of years ago, believe it or not, before AI—ChatGPT in particular—became the ubiquitous entities they are today.)
People use ChatGPT for recipes, work emails, for help navigating a difficult conversation, and even romance. I admit that I used ChatGPT to figure out how to communicate with my auto mechanic about my broken air conditioner. In a male-dominated world, I have often felt taken advantage of while also lacking the skills and knowledge to properly advocate for myself. ChatGPT gave me the language I needed to feel confident navigating that world.
But I still think that is different than prompting ChatGPT to write a book about x, y, z, and then claiming authorship of the generated text.
Sure, there is nuance here. When I approached my writer friends about this issue, one friend noted that technically using a tool like spellcheck is using AI. So, where does the line get drawn?
But I think asking AI to do preliminary edits for you—spellcheck, grammar check, even word suggestions—is different from prompting ChatGPT to write something for you and/or taking your writing, inputting it into ChatGPT, and asking it to write it better for you.
So, why am I writing this… what is this?… A manifesto? A letter of complaint? Or simply this Substack post? It’s because within the last few months, every prose manuscript I have been given to edit has been very obviously written with AI—at least partially if not entirely.
You might be saying to yourself, “Oh, it must be obvious because of the em dashes.” No—it’s—not—the—em—dashes. I use em dashes all the time, and I have done so for years. What is it? It’s the sentences that start off with a question on every single page. Sometimes every paragraph. It’s the phrases, “It’s not about blah blah blah, it’s about blah blah blah” or “It’s more than just blah blah blah, it’s blah blah blah” or “It’s about more than just blah blah blah, it’s also about blah blah blah.” OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Every time I read a sentence in this structure now, I feel like my eyeballs start bleeding and the skin starts peeling away from my face. In AI-generated work, there’s at least one of these sentence structures per page, and even per paragraph! I officially HATE this sentence structure more than I hate when people start a sentence with “You see”.
Everything begins “as a whisper”, and in fact the word “whisper” as a noun is so overly used, as well as the adjective “quiet”. If you need examples of what I mean, watch this Instagram reel of me going off.
Like I mentioned earlier, an AI-generated text is also just fluff. It doesn’t say anything substantial or specific because it can’t—only an author can do that. Then while the content is absolute dribble, the punctuation is perfect. **red flag red flag red flag**
With one manuscript, I reached out to the author saying, “This reads like it was written by AI.” They wrote me back saying, “I’ve found [ChatGPT] really helpful for editing some of my grammar errors and for finding synonyms when I was stuck on certain words. Using it felt like a safe way to edit, research, and explore different word choices. However I did not rely on [ChatGPT] to write my book.”
But writers are not realizing that when they put in their own writing, prompt ChatGPT to “edit the grammar”… the results are NO LONGER THEIR WRITING. In fact, that IS relying on ChatGPT to write your book for you.
In the last manuscript I edited, the entire thing reeked of AI writing. Basically the “author” asked ChatGPT to write a book on a particular subject and then just copy and pasted the whole thing and then tried to pass it off as their own writing.
Not only is this embarrassing because it is painfully obvious that is what happened, it is unethical. Whether it was written by another human being or by AI, passing off writing that you did not write as your own is plagiarism. It is fraud. It is lying.
What’s more, AI was “trained” to write from thousands of books being input into it, books that were written by authors who were not compensated for their work being used and who weren’t even made aware that it was happening. That is theft.
Plus, those authors (myself included) have spent years honing their craft. I, for one, have read dozens of books, have taken dozens of workshops, have gone back to school, have attended critique groups, volunteered at writers conferences so I could attend when they were out of my budget, and the list goes on and on and on. I have been learning to write for TEN YEARS. And now someone with no background in writing wants to publish a book, and instead of putting in the effort of learning how to write and put a book together, they just want to skirt any and all effort and have AI write their book for them. Luckily, AI is kind of a shitty writer right now. But eventually as more and more books are stolen and input, AI will get better at it, and maybe there will come a time when an AI-written text is indistinguishable from a human-written text. I hope the world doesn’t come to that, but it’s probably inevitable.
In the meantime, it’s for these reasons—on top of the egregious environmental damage AI causes—that I will not be editing manuscripts generated by AI. My updated Memorandum of Understanding will require authors to initial that their work was not written using AI (with an exception for spelling and grammar check software).
Thank you for reading. If you have additional thoughts, questions, or commentary on this, you can message me directly. If you don’t have my contact information, you can go through my website https://annemariewellswriter.com/contact