Writing with AI

If you've written a book using AI and you want it to sound more … human, it's going to cost. It won't be the cheap route to publication you imagined, because putting machine-writing into human-speak isn't easy.

The first book I edited written by AI from start to finish had a lot of information and made a reasonable argument. Some of it was no worse — and in places better — than material I've edited from human clients. But it was also repetitive, boring, and structured in a way only AI would have structured it, in lots of single-sentence laundry-lists.

The author hired me to put the book into human.

Here's what I learned. AI can write but it can't write well. It writes for people who don't really like to read. After more than a few pages, its patterns repeat until the whole thing sounds the same.

My colleagues tend to see AI as a threat, but I see an opportunity. There's already a backlash against anything perceived as AI writing among real readers, so someone still has to turn AI drafts into something a living person wants to read.

Is AI coming for ghostwriters' and editors' jobs? I don't think so.

Except, maybe, for one specific market: people who see both writing and reading as inefficient and outdated forms of communication to be reduced to the simplest exchange of information possible.

For everyone else, the gap between "readable" and "worth reading" is still very human.