My Feelings About Generative AI
I don’t use generative AI in my editing process, and I don’t plan to in the future. This is a matter of personal preference, and I’m not saying that copyeditors shouldn’t use AI tools or that these tools have no value. I use PerfectIt and macros as part of my editing checklist but a lot of copyeditors don’t, and that’s totally fine. Some editors find generative AI saves them a lot of time while copyediting, proofreading, or drafting articles and blog posts. It’s all a matter of preference. But while I see a number of editors talking about the pluses of generative AI and encouraging others to use it, I haven’t seen a lot of posts by editors who are hesitant or resistant to this tech. I wanted to write this post in part to say that I’m not using generative AI, nor do I think copyeditors should feel pressured to use it.
My concerns about using generative AI tools break down into three main points.
1. I don’t want to feed either my clients’ work or my own writing into the large language models (LLMs) of companies like Google, Microsoft, or Adobe. When I work with independent clients, I have them sign a contract that says I won’t share their work without their permission. I’ve also signed contracts for the publishers I work for to swear that I won’t share or distribute novel manuscripts, comics, manga, etc. If I were to use something like ChatGPT, Adobe, or Copilot, I would be feeding my clients’ work into a giant corporation’s LLM, and that corporation may turn around and use my clients’ work to train newer versions of their products.
2. Any time that I might save by using AI is likely to be spent double- and triple-checking the resulting text to make sure it’s correct. AI is often wrong, and while a misspelled word or misplaced comma is annoying, inaccuracy in other areas can be deadly.
As a copyeditor, I use internet search engines every day, and I often look up super weird things—like pirate slang, the size of nuclear fallout zones, what rolligons are, etc. For several months, even before Google pivoted to providing AI-driven results, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo. I actually really like to do research, I enjoy learning about whales, space elevators, video games of the ’80s, the history of tabletop games, and more. And, yes, I may spend a bit too much time on research sometimes, but I feel I owe it to my authors and publishers to get things right. Right now, I can’t and won’t trust generative AI to do fact checking. If I were editing a book about foraging for mushrooms in the forest, I am NOT going to show a picture of a mushroom to a generative AI program and trust it when it says a mushroom is safe for human consumption (https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/28/16054834/mushroom-identifying-app-machine-vision-ai-dangerous).
3. Generative AI requires a lot of resources to run, not just electricity but also massive amounts of water. I don’t want to get into the more technical aspects of this, but in her article for Nature Kate Crawford writes, “It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.” (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00478-x) I’m sure that companies like Google and Microsoft could build systems that use less water and energy; unfortunately, they don’t seem motivated to do so. Likely this is because doing so would eat into their profits. As someone concerned about climate change, I can’t see using such an energy-intensive tool to do the editing tasks that I’ve done on my own for so many years.
Again, if you’re a copyeditor who uses generative AI for copyediting and you like it and feel it saves you time and adds value to your work, that’s great. But I would ask that folks who use and love generative AI to be thoughtful when advocating for its use. Those of us who don’t want to use AI or who are hesitant about it are not technophobes or Luddites. The promises of AI are seductive, but they are often overblown. Plus, subscriptions to services like ProWriting Aid and Grammarly aren’t cheap. For me, I’m planning to continue editing the way I have for the past seven years, without AI and with entirely too many empty mugs on my desk.