As more and more people attempt to write books using AI, I’m seeing a trend – one that has also been witnessed by my fellow ghostwriters and editors – of more and more clients coming to us and asking for editing services. These clients are the smart ones who recognise that just writing a book with AI isn’t enough: you also need to have it edited by a human. In some cases that I’ve seen, the manuscript even needed completely rewriting from scratch.
Why, though? If you don’t work in publishing or haven’t written a book before, you might not understand just what goes into making a publishable, readable book – and you might not understand why a human editor is SO important, no matter who wrote the book. Let’s go through some key reasons why you need a human editor for anything you’ve written using AI prompts.
To make them legally compliant
This is a big one, and it’s got big repercussions. AI books are still in a grey legal area, mostly due to the fact that there are still plenty of lawsuits and other kinds of legal action ongoing against AI companies regarding the way they trained their LLMs. What we do know right now is that AI-generated content cannot be copyrighted… unless it has been significantly edited by a human.
Now, you might not think that this is a huge issue, but it really is. Let’s imagine someone steals your book and puts it on ‘sale’ for free or even at a price and steals your customers away, leaving you with much lower profits and no recourse to get that money back. You would normally take legal action to protect your ownership of the work – but if it was generated by AI, then you don’t have ownership of the work. There’s nothing you can do about theft – you simply don’t have the rights to the sole ownership of your book.
This level of risk also has reverberations through the way your book will be published by the publishing industry. If you want a traditional publishing contract, forget about it. While some AI-written books have managed to slip through and get huge book deals, even the slightest whiff of suspicion about your book being AI-generated will have them pulling the plug and asking for their money back. This isn’t a hypothetical – it’s really happened, to authors like Mia Ballard and Jerry Falade.
Taking that risk seems like a pretty poor idea in the face of just hiring a ghostwriter to go over the manuscript and make it human.
To get rid of hallucinations and inconsistencies
The next thing you want to worry about with AI-generated text is that, as we all know, AI can be subject to hallucinations. This can range from the factual (such as inventing a fake law in your legal drama, sending characters to a place that doesn’t exist in what is supposed to be a realistic work, or advising you to include details that aren’t accurate when you use it for research into a topic you aren’t personally familiar with) to the very consistency of the book.
As a real world example, I actually had a client bring an AI-generated manuscript to me in which the character drives a certain type of car in chapter one – let’s say a blue Jeep – and in chapter five, they zoom by in their black Jaguar. This inconsistency didn’t seem like a problem for the AI, which had forgotten it had already assigned a car to the character (and probably didn’t fully understand that people tend to have one car that they drive around). But for a human reader, it stood out jarringly. This was just one example in the manuscript, which was littered with more of the same: characters changing names or relationships to the main character, events happening twice because the AI forgot it had already used that idea, tropes going off-piste and not delivering the expected payoff – even mysteries being forgotten about and never resolved within the text, which would be so frustrating for the reader.
It’s not just fiction that can fall foul of this, either. Imagine writing your memoir with AI and finding inconsistencies in your own life story – made up events, incongruencies like a mobile phone being used in the 1970s, or so on. Or trying to establish yourself as an expert and thought leader with a non-fiction book, only to give your readers bogus advice and ‘facts’ that anyone with a beginner’s interest in your industry would spot as fake. Your reputation could be ruined in an instant.
Don’t take AI’s word for it – and don’t trust yourself to spot them all unless you’re a professional editor, either, because…
Because all books need to be edited
Just because you’ve tried to skip the actual writing part of the book-making process, doesn’t mean you can skip all of the other parts, too. Editing is an extremely important part of the publishing process, for a very good reason: it’s often very difficult to see the flaws in work that we are close to.
Every book should have a professional editor go over it, because they will spot the things that need to be changed: the typos that your eye skims over because it knows what should be there, the plot holes that you hadn’t thought of or haven’t explained as well as you thought you had, the structural issues that would make a reader put the book down. All of these things can make or break a book after release. You can have the best marketing team in the world, but if all your reviews are coming in at below three stars, your book simply isn’t going to have a very long shelf life.
No matter who writes a book, it needs to be edited – and this should be done with a human, someone who actually understands context and the rules of grammar. Even the best-selling plugins for AI editing don’t understand how to examine context – just have a character speak in slang (like ‘gonna’, for example, instead of ‘going to’) inside speech marks and see what the grammar checker makes of it. It’s going to tell you that you’ve made a mistake – but a human editor would understand the context of this being speech, which is allowed to be flawed and grammatically incorrect because of what that tells us about the character, and leave it be.
There are countless reasons why every book should have a human editor, including those which were written by AI. If I’ve convinced you to start taking your book seriously and do the right next step instead of sending it out into the world half-baked, you can get in touch with me at any time to discuss rates and availability, or check out more information about my services and rates here.
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