It seems that everywhere I look online right now I’m being hit with ads for courses in how to use AI, ads for AI products and articles about why we should or shouldn’t use AI.
As a proofreader, copy editor and self publishing service provider for the past 20 years, I know that people aren’t perfect. No matter how good an editor is, something is likely to slip through, and that’s where many folk think AI will solve all their publishing problems. All they have to do is run their book through a spelling and grammar checker and it will be quicker, cheaper and more effective than paying an editor. And then a proofreader. And then still finding out that something slipped through!
But the catch is – how do you know it will be more effective? How will you know if it’s picked everything up? If you didn’t pick up what the human eye also missed, would you pick up what the AI program missed?
Now, I know that not all spelling and grammar checkers are made equal. I also know that people won’t spend money if they don’t see the point, so I believe that many authors are going to rely on the inbuilt spelling and grammar checkers that come with their word processing programs. So let’s have a little fun … let’s type some things into MS Word and see what happens …
Please note that this video does contain a couple of words and ideas that might offend some viewers, but that’s not the intent. They help illustrate my point, plus they amused me, so hopefully they’ll amuse you, too. 😉
Now I’m not saying don’t use a spelling and grammar checker. Used properly, it should certainly help reduce your editing and proofreading costs by picking up the most obvious issues. The catch is – if you rely solely on an AI tool for your editing and proofreading, how will you know what it missed? Or got wrong?
These tools learn from what’s already out there. But they don’t know what’s going on in your head – until you publish it. At the end of the day, AI (like the rest of us) doesn’t know what it doesn’t know – until it knows it. And by then it could be all too late …
PS: I have to admit that I did have fun using AI to create the image used for this blog post. So I’m not saying that AI doesn’t have its uses – we just need to be careful about how much we rely on it.