Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Confessions of an AI Editor

At the start-up I worked for, I was judged not by my ability to be a good reader but by my capacity to become one with a machine.

Outdoor typewriting class for secretaries, 1932.

It was ironic that the literary services start-up had been founded by an editor. But if you’d met her, that wouldn’t surprise you. The labor of editing, she believed, was arduous and its romanticization undeserved. To her, the taste of selection was the sole editorial virtue, everything else a chore. In her ideal world, each piece of copy would already come with tracked changes, leaving the prudent editor with little more than the discretion to press “Accept” or “Reject.” She would happily relegate the rest of the labor and presumed others would feel this way too. And so, when she created her company, she gave away all the “drudgery” to the thing, an artificial-intelligence tool. Like Pygmalion, she built it in her image, and like Pygmalion, she loved what she had wrought. Even if she might hesitate to call it flawless, it was preferable to the many entry-level copy editors who routinely sent in their CVs, eager to do her bidding. After all, the thing could produce an editorial memo in less than a minute. In a few seconds, it could parse a tangled paragraph and downsize it to a corporatized readability, or copy-edit a chapter in the time it takes to shift between browsers. “I taught it as I taught you,” my boss said. With her tool by my side, I could edit a piece of prose without so much as reading a line.

My boss would sit at her long, lonely desk for hours, the picture of a classic editor. Her rainbow-coded bookcase was the work of a handsomely paid book stylist who, I imagined, read only the spines. When I interrupted her, she would tap her glasses till they landed, precisely each time, on the edge of her nose, a compliment to the gravity of her downward glare. This editorial chic perhaps served to make the uncool, fraught endeavour of using artificial intelligence for the time-honored work of editing appear less offensive. At parties, I could never admit where I worked. It was like lying about a bad boyfriend.

The type of tool my boss’s company had created was christened, sometimes pejoratively, an “AI wrapper.” For a tool created by “wrapping” foundation models with an interface inviting enough to goad you into buying yet another subscription, “wrapper” is a fitting descriptor. All a company has to do to make one is pretty up the existing Big AI models. On the back end, the system instructions my boss had written would begin, “You are a diligent editor…,” and once you uploaded a manuscript onto the thing, it would answer with the disarming confidence of one. The first time I used it to line-edit a chapter of a book, the sight of the text being pressed into cohesion was spectacular.

In the initial days of the job, I’d judge the thing’s judgment and report back on any of its transgressions. As I occupied the lowest rung of the editorial ladder, I couldn’t even say that I was training it to replace me. When it was right, it was right, and when it was wrong, we were wrong: All the blame for its hallucinations was to be shared with the human who bungled the prompt my boss offered it.

My condition at the company became only more demoralizing when I tried to humanize the thing as a means of selling it to clients. (If I wanted to be a better editor, I also had to learn how to be a marketer, my boss reasoned.) Once, I called it my boss’s doppelgänger; other times, I pitched it as a patient, forgiving editor, one certain not to take forever to validate the writer. “Unless you run out of tokens,” I’d joke. “And, of course, you can bug it on the weekends,” my boss would say.

Although I was as compliant as workers come, I almost never read........

© The Nation