This is the original draft of the accompanying article, preserved before editorial work began.
On this website AI works as an editor and as a ghostwriter. Having worked with a professional (human!) editor on my as yet unpublished book, I know how editing works, and especially how invaluable it is in a serious writing process. My Editor did not make my writing work easier, he made it more difficult, because he was constantly asking questions, suggesting things go in a different order, suggesting ways that I can be clearer, or suggesting that I cut out parts entirely. In fact, the reason my book has not been published is mostly because of how much time I have spent trying to incorporate my Editor’s suggestions. While I don’t use all of his suggestions, I use most of them, because he knows what he is doing also, and I ignore him at my peril. This is how I use AI in my writing as well. AI will make suggestions about different wording, paragraph order, and syntax, and it will suggest when something I have written could use an example. It will also make suggestions for how I can say things more clearly or more succinctly.
Because AI is AI and not human, I find myself using fewer of its recommendations than I have with a human editor but I find it just as valuable. When AI looks at something I have written, it has been instructed not to change a single thing until I give my personal approval. I only give approval if I believe one of the following is true:
- What it suggests is better than what I have already written.
- The writing actually sounds like me.
If I do think it’s better but I don’t think it sounds like me, I will work on it and tweak it either until it sounds like me or until I decide I can’t make it sound like me and ditch it. It doesn’t just get the thumbs up because it’s AI and I assume it’s better, or because I don’t want to do the work of editing an AI suggestion until it bears my unique voice. In this way I can say, “Every single thing on this site is me. AI is not in charge here, AI does not make decisions here. AI is a tool for me to do my best work to my own highest standard.”
Second, AI is a ghostwriter. There are times the AI will suggest a brand-new article that needs to be written in order to help my target audience more efficiently. I welcome these articles and read every word. In those cases I end up being the editor or I am reviewing what has been written and using it as a starting point for what I want to say on that topic. Auto-publishing is an option on this website, where I could enable the AI to write an article and publish it automatically to the site, but I turned that off immediately when I signed on to this website. AI can suggest whatever it wants, but nothing goes on this site until I have reviewed it, edited it, and made it into something I recognize as my own. My eyeballs have touched every published word on the site and not a single thing gets printed here without my input and effort.
