The temptation is understandable: AI promises to give us everything. A polished manuscript in just a few clicks. Editing that works better than any real professional editor. A book you can publish directly from the prompts. But the reality of the situation is far from the promise, and those who edit their books with AI often find themselves having to scramble for a real editor afterwards. Why? Because…
AI hallucinates
This is the first and biggest problem faced by AI. AI hallucinates and, with a larger data set such as a whole manuscript, it can hallucinate even more. For example, I had a client who wanted a book she had written with AI turned into something that worked. She correctly identified that the AI had produced an error-strewn, cliched, boring, and repetitive manuscript that didn’t fit the saleability she was aiming for.
The problems started, however, when she took the manuscript I had edited and ran it back through an AI prompt, asking it to check for anything that still needed changing. It repeatedly told her that I had used certain words too many times – some of them had only been used once or twice, and one example had not been used anywhere in the manuscript at all. On top of that, it cautioned her to avoid using the same brands repeatedly – for example, suggesting that the main character change from driving a Jeep in the first few chapters to driving a Honda in the next few so that readers didn’t find it repetitive. Of course, this would introduce an inconsistency. I had to let my client know that I wanted her thoughts on the manuscript, as a reader – not the ‘thoughts’ of an AI that, when told to look for errors, will try to come up with some even if they aren’t there.
AI kills originality
The other problem with AI editing is that it wants to remove all the originality from your manuscript and turn it into a bland approximation of everything else it has in its database. It wants to make everything as uniform as possible, which means bringing you back down to a baseline it deems appropriate – stripping out the creativity and unique voice of your work.
So many pieces of classic literature use unexpected forms and creative differences to stand out. Take The Road by Cormac McCarthy. There are no speech marks in the entire novel, some words that should be hyphenated have the hyphens removed, there are no character names except for one. This is all intentional and creative on the author’s part, showing the breakdown of language and traditional forms during the apocalyptic end of society. Imagine if it had been run through an AI editor – all that originality would be lost, and the novel would not be the celebrated classic it is today.
AI doesn’t know the market
The final problem with using AI as a book editor is that it doesn’t know the market. All it can use for reference material is books that have already been published (often illegally, and amongst that is mixed in reference to blog posts, forum threads, and all kinds of other lower-quality writing output). It does not know what the market is currently doing – the only people who know that are the real human editors who are currently working on the next raft of books yet to be released.
AI might tell you that a certain subgenre of fantasy must include dragons or the reader will be turned off and want to buy something else. But AI doesn’t know that the industry has just released a couple of extremely popular novels in this subgenre that were based around sea serpents instead, and that the market has begun to respond enthusiastically. AI doesn’t know that behind the scenes, publishers are gearing up to publish a spate of unicorn-based novels that are tipped to do very well. Only the real humans working in the industry know this.
Don’t take advice from someone who doesn’t know the market – this applies to your neighbour Jane and her unsolicited opinions as much as it applies to an AI model!
If you’ve read this far, hopefully you now understand why you need a human editor to work on your manuscript. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, only a human editor can bring out the best in it and create something that other humans will actually enjoy reading. Get in touch today if you’d like to share the details of your manuscript and discuss how we can work together to achieve this goal.
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