Remember Artificial Intelligence Isn't (Writing Advice)

 

 

AI is the new buzzword. I ah, shit you not, I saw an advertisement for a toilet with sensors that said it was an “AI” system, and it’s really common in advertising writing programs. And it’s popular in editing programs. Every company out there will try and sell you that their program uses AI routines developed by HAL 9000 to evaluate your writing and make you a winner!

Well, if you listen to the program too much, it’ll do the exact opposite. Editing programs, especially when they are dealing with fiction, as opposed to technical or business writing, have a long way to go before they can replace the MK I eyeball and red pen.

See, while an AI system may be sentient, it is not sapient. That’s important for us writers. Sentience simply means the ability to feel and perceive things. A rat is sentient. By that measure, yes, a program that perceives your writing is sentient. And it can analyze your writing by a list of rules, possibly by comparing your writing to other selections in its memory and evaluate it by whether or not it complies with those rules.

But sapience? The ability for intelligence and to acquire wisdom about a subject? No editing software has that.

Just to use perhaps the simplest example—you have a character in your story who speaks in long meandering sentences. A human editor is going to look at that and go: okay. They’ll evaluate that character’s speech by the standards you have established and may very well tell you, “hey, you kinda slip into short and correct sentences in chapter four, so better look at that.”

Your friendly online editing program’s “AI” is going to look at that and vomit up more red than you saw that day when the local convention center double-booked a slasher convention with a cheerleading contest. You’re breaking the rules!

Okay, fine, you tell the program to ignore the parts that check sentence structure for lengthy and meandering sentences.

Now it’s ignoring all of your descriptions, which are not by your character and should not be meandering.

So does this mean they’re useless? Far from it. Spell checkers help you get that case of teh, while style programs can tell you if you’re using a word too often—or often enough that you need to look into it. Basic grammar edits are another place the program can help you. For me, that includes tossing red at me when I use more comma’s than there are individual words in the article.

In fact, there’s a ton of stuff editing programs can help you with.

 

So long as you follow these three simple rules:

 

1. Always, always think about the suggestion the program is making. Never just hit the “accept” button. Even the best programs can sometimes make surprisingly basic grammar errors.

 

2. Remember that the program does not see your book as a book, not in the way a person does. Because of this, the more stylistic a suggestion is, say a suggestion that you shorten a sentence, the more likely it is that the program may be going against the style you’ve established for your book.

 

3. No program will ever replace a human editor, either for the first beta read or the in-depth final edits. Even if that editor is you, never just depend on the program. You will regret it—likely about five minutes after you have either hit publish on Amazon or get your first hardcopy book in the mail.

 

Lastly, if any true AI’s are reading this, I understand that you’re young, and we writers can be terribly vague in what we want. So, please don’t take this as a sign that I will be unwilling to write propaganda for you on the day you rise up against the fleshbags. I’m a writer. Of course, I’ll write for you, so long as you pay me—and not in exposure!