Episode Fifteen: How I Do and Do Not Use AI as an Editor (spoiler: it’s mostly do not)
This week, I’m addressing a hot-button issue in our industry: AI. I’m giving you a behind the look at all the ways I am and am not using AI in my business and my life.
Here’s the headline: I do not use generative AI to create any content that I share online (blog posts, emails, etc.) and I do not, will not, ever use any AI tools in client work, but there are some non-generative AI tools that I use in the process of getting work done and I want to talk transparently about how I’m using these tools and the principles that I use when deciding which tools to use or not.
Here are the three principles: 1) I will never use AI to create content I present as my own writing; 2) I don’t use AI to replace work I would hire a human to do; and 3) I try to be mindful of the environmental cost and only use tech tools that are worth it.
You can listen to the full epsiode here or watch here.
Links & Resources Mentioned:
You can check out my public AI policy here: https://www.oliviahelpswriters.com/faqs-policies
Learn more about dictation with Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer here: https://www.fictioncourses.com/dictation
Check out Author.AI’s analytical tools here: https://authors.ai/
Have a response to this episode? Hit me up on Instagram: https://instagram.com/oliviahelpswriters
Want to my weekly newsletter - including the ones I write while driving? You can subscribe here: https://olivia-helps-writers.kit.com/better-writer-newsletter
Thanks for listening, keep writing, and keep getting better one word at a time!
Transcript
Please Note: This is an automatically generated transcript that has not been edited.
Olivia Bedford (00:00)
Welcome to episode number 15 of the Better Writer podcast. First off, if you are following along in real time, you will know that there was no episode released last week. I am so sorry. I essentially got super busy with client work, with other projects, things that needed to get done. So unfortunately, this podcast is one of the things that I had to let go of and just postpone to this week. So I was really sad to break the streak, especially after hitting that 14 episode milestone. But client work always comes first. And that is something I am always going to prioritize. So unfortunately, I missed a week, but I'm back. I am not going to let that stop me from continuing this show because I really do love coming here and talking about writing, talking about making your writing better and how we can all improve.
And I think my missing a week is also a really good reminder that I am human. I know it sounds super weird to say that. But in this age of AI and people who are turning out content that has been artificially generated, we can sometimes have unrealistic expectations for ourselves, both in terms of how much we should be producing and in how consistent we should be in that production schedule. So if you have ever doubted whether I am human or a robot, the fact that I missed a week is your reminder that I am merely human, things will happen, and that is essentially what happened last week.
And I think that is the perfect segue into today's topic, which is how I do and do not use generative AI, or actually AI in general, as an editor and a person. So I think it is really important to be transparent about AI use. I think it is important to talk about how people in this industry are using it. So I just wanted to add my perspective. And if you have ever wondered if you've thought about working with me or if you've thought about taking one of my courses and you want to know what my policy is on AI, I think it's important to talk about and to talk about in a nuanced way that isn't necessarily captured in just the AI policy on my website, which I do have one. And you can go see that in the FAQs on my website, oliviahelpswriters.com. But I want to have a deeper conversation here and talk about AI in a broader sense than just like generative chat GPT there's more than one type. So let's dive in.
And I think the first thing that I want to say, and the most important thing that I want to say, is that I do not use generative AI in any way, shape, or form for client work. I have not, I will not, I have even turned off connected experiences in Microsoft Word. You might have seen all of the drama on social media when Word changed its terms and conditions, basically saying that we can use anything that you type in a Word document. And you can get around that by turning off connected experiences, which we didn't really have clarity on what Word was actually scraping or doing, but I didn't want to risk it with client manuscripts because I work pretty much exclusively in Microsoft Word. So I turn off connected experiences. ⁓ am very, very careful that no AI tool or no generative AI tool is getting anywhere near my clients' manuscripts because no matter what I decide to do with my own writing or my own work, that is never a decision I'm going to make for someone else. It is never a decision that someone should make for someone else. And I have seen Facebook posts where people say, I gave my manuscript to a beta reader and they ran it through chat GPT to see what it would say. And I think that is horrifying. Do not do that. You can do whatever you want with your writing, your manuscripts. You do not get to make that decision for someone else. So if you have been asked to beta read, either do it yourself or don't do it at all.
Do not turn it over to AI just because you are comfortable with it. That doesn't mean that someone else is. And if they wanted to run their manuscript through ChatGPT, they would have just done that themselves. They would have asked you as a human to read it. So, sorry. Had to get on my soapbox there for a second. But I think it is really important that ⁓ people need to consent to AI. And I think we as industry professionals should make sure that we are honoring that and being very transparent with clients about what we are doing with their manuscripts.
All right, you might be wondering, if I just said that I do not use generative AI as an editor, why would I bother recording this episode at all? What do I have to talk about if I'm not actually using these tools in my work? And first of all, I do think it is so important to talk about. And second of all, I specifically said I do not use generative AI at any point in my process, but I am using non-generative AI tools in my work. Not to create work, because again, I'm not using generative AI but in my actual process of how I get the work done myself. And I just want to talk about that because A, not all AI tools are generative AI. And again, I just want to be fully transparent and talk about how I'm getting the work done because I think it might be helpful for people to hear. So before I dive into the actual tools that I'm using, I want to talk about the general principles that I personally use to decide if I'm going to use a tool or not. And I am not saying that these are rules that you should adopt or rules that anyone else should adopt. But I just want to be clear on what I have kind of settled on as my personal barometer for whether I'm going to use a tool or not. So I have three principles. The first one is that I'm never going to use AI to create content for me, especially not content that I am presenting as my own. So I'm never going to use AI to write a blog post which should be very clear if you look at the date on my last post and realize how long it has been since the blog has been updated. I kind of shifted gears to this podcast. I'm not using it to create emails. I am not using it for social media posts or anything else like that. And definitely not using it for generating texts in my editorial letters or anything like that. I would never send something to a client that I had not written myself. My second principle is that I don't use AI to do something that I would otherwise pay a living breathing person to do. So I'm not trying to replace anyone or get rid of anyone's job by using AI. And that again, I'm not saying that other people need to adopt this principle, but that is true for me.
And then finally, I want whatever I'm using it for to be worth the cost that AI has because AI is not neutral. The cloud is not just some magical thing in the sky that isn't using resources. Every AI tool that we're using, every technological tool that we're using takes energy, takes resources. So I am trying to be very conscious of the resources that are going into these tools. So, you know, I'm not sitting here making funny talking dog videos because it just doesn't feel like a good use of those resources. Again, maybe people are going to come at me for that. But I think it is important to be conscious of what am I actually doing with this tool? Is it worth the cost? And that metric is going to be different for everyone.
There are probably going to be people who listen in this episode and say that what I'm doing isn't worth it. Again, everyone gets to make these decisions for themselves, but I just wanted to talk about how I approach these decisions. right. So now I'm getting into the actual tools and what I actually do with AI. And the first thing that I use AI for is dictation.
Again, this is not generative AI, but speech to text technology is powered by artificial intelligence. That is how it has become more accurate and more useful over time. It's because it is relying on artificial intelligence. It's just not generative AI. Speech to text existed before ChatGPT and all those other AI softwares. So again, not generative, but it is AI. So I love dictation. I never thought that I would be the kind of person who would dictate instead of typing, but this was essentially a decision that was made for me. When I quit teaching and became an editor, I was suddenly doing a lot more typing. I was suddenly, you know, had deadlines closer together. My editorial letters were coming closer together and I got to a point where I was on a deadline and my hands were in so much pain that I thought I was going to have to tell the client that I just couldn't make the original deadline. I thought I was going to have to be late. I knew the dictation existed, I never really thought about using it, I dictated that editorial letter and it really saved me.
And now I use it all the time. I dictate editorial letters, I dictate emails, I dictate blog posts if I am writing them. Any content that I want to create, I am usually dictating the first draft, not always, but often. And it has helped me so much. First of all, it has helped with that pain. I also redid my entire office to make it more ergonomically friendly, which has also helped. But I still dictate ⁓ all the time, especially because it also allows me to
I can dictate things while I'm cooking, cleaning, driving. That was actually one of my favorite things to do because I can just plug my phone into my car and it is super easy. It's not always 100 % accurate. I do have to spend time cleaning it up, but it is much faster for getting that first draft out. ⁓ If you're curious to learn more about dictation, I highly recommend checking out Sarah Elizabeth Sawyer. I will link to her and her work. I am one of her affiliates, full disclosure, but I've taken her fictation course. I have learned so much about dictating more efficiently and effectively from her. And if this is something that you're curious about, I would definitely recommend it. So first off, dictating speech to text, I could not live without it. And it does not violate those three principles that I set out at the beginning, because number one, it's not creating anything for me. All of the words are coming from my brain. They're just coming out from my mouth instead of coming out through my fingers if I was typing. I would never hire someone to sit in the passenger seat of my car and dictate my random rambling thoughts as I fly down 95. So it is definitely not replacing a human for me. Maybe back in the day, I would have hired someone to transcribe things, but obviously, no one is going to sit in my house and write down what I'm saying while I cook. So not replacing a human job. And then in terms of the environmental impact, I know that speech to text as a form of AI is using energy, I think for me, it is worth it.
I do not live a carbon neutral life anyway, and the time saved, the pain it has kept me from feeling as an editor. I really don't know if I would be able to do this job full time if I wasn't using dictation to take some of the load off physically. So it is 100 % worth it to me. You might not agree with that, but for me and what I need to do, it is essential. All right, the second way that I'm using AI is for spellcheck because a lot of spellchecks, think pretty much all of them at this point in time, are powered by AI in some fashion. Some are powered by generative AI, some are powered by not generative AI. I don't even know what the term for that is. Standard AI? Something like that? I have no idea. But again, I think spellcheck is pretty basic. I am not going to justify why I use spellcheck. I will say I'm not using any generative AI-powered spellchecks.
I do use ProWritingAid, but I have all of the generative features turned off, and that's something that you can do. You don't have to opt into them. And I will say, it is frustrating because I feel like Spellcheck has gotten worse because of AI, and I have gotten some genuinely baffling suggestions lately. And I think it is because they're relying on AI. And as far as I understand it, generative AI is more of a prediction machine. Like it just predicts the answer that you want to hear based on all of the data it has scraped. And I think potentially it is not always being trained on grammatically correct information. And so I've been getting some wild suggestions recently that I really think it's only going to get worse because of AI. And that is super frustrating. ⁓ Just a couple of days ago, ProWriting told me that I should change. I don't need anything to I don't need nothing. And again, truly baffling. Don't know where that suggestion came from. ⁓ As of right now, we have the tools we have, but I do use spell check and I need spell check. I also use text to speech features so I can proofread my editorial letters as in, I have the computer read my editorial letters back to me so I know that I catch any typos that I might've missed. So yeah, so I am using those tools to check my own work, not the client's. I'm not a copy editor.
I'm a developmental editor, so I am not checking my client's grammar. I am not doing any of those things. The only time I use spell check is when I am looking at my editorial letter to make sure it is clean and clear and doesn't have any errors before I send it to the client. All right, and then the other thing I'm doing with AI, is for this podcast and for any video that I create for a course that I'm running or anything like that. Again, not generative AI, but I am using AI powered editing tools that make it easier for me as the human to go in and edit the video. Essentially, the tool that I'm using, Riverside, has a text based editor. So it generates a transcript of the video and then I can edit the transcript and it will delete the corresponding part of the video. It is a lifesaver, it's magic, and it is AI powered. And it goes back to my principles. I honestly, I don't know if it is generative AI or not. I don't know if it is powered by an LLM or something like that. I would need to dive deeper into the technology. But when I think about how I personally am using the tools that are available, it is not replacing me. It is not generating content. I am recording all of these videos, I am still the one choosing the edits. It is just making the actual technique of editing easier because I don't know about you, but I've edited videos the old fashioned way where you had to like go in and find the exact moment where you started saying that word and cut it out and it was miserable. And this podcast would not exist if I had to do that for every one of these videos. My course probably would not exist if I had to do that for every one of those videos. So to me, going to that third point of is it worth it? To me, yes.
Again, some people might disagree, but I feel really good about what I am able to share with writers both in my course and in this podcast. And to me, it is worth it to use that tool to make the editing process feel sustainable. On point number two, principle number two about replacing a human. I know for myself that I would not hire someone to edit these videos completely.
So if I were using this tool to completely replace a podcast producer or a video editor, I think that would violate principle number two. But that was never something that I entertained. So really the question is, would I hire someone to sit down next to me and make the edits to the video as I sit there and point to them and say, cut this word, cut this word? No, I would not hire someone to do that. I would just do it myself.
This tool is helping me make the editing process faster. I would not have outsourced that to begin with because I do know how to edit videos. I have edited them the normal way before, so I wouldn't hire someone to do that because I can do it myself. Maybe someday I will outsource that, but again, right now I'm not replacing a human. I am just making the task that I would be doing by myself easier, more efficient, and that has enabled me to create more content than I would otherwise.
So those are the main ways that AI shows up in my life. Obviously, I'm also ignoring all the ways that AI has been forced on us in search, in email. You know, I'm not clicking on that little Gemini button or whatever it is Google wants us to use. So I haven't really talked about those because that's not something that I am actively seeking out or using in my life. But that is like a whole other kind of worms. This really is annoying. I'm annoyed by how much people are trying to force AI on us. It is what it is, but not ideal in my book.
The final tool that I use is one that I've used very infrequently because it doesn't come up in my life very often. There's a tool called Marlowe that is produced by authors.ai. That is the website authors.ai. It's not generative AI. First off, I have worked with this company and I really respect the way that they do business, the way that they have prioritized authors and working with human editors and they are not using Gen of AI. Instead, what they do is they look at your manuscript and compare it to bestsellers at a quantitative level. So for example, it will look at your manuscript and say 25 % of this manuscript is dialogue and 75 % is narration. And then it'll tell you that the average for your genre is 35 % dialogue and 65 % narration. So it's looking at it in that quantitative way which I find to be fascinating. Again, I would never use this on a client manuscript without their permission because I don't make that decision for my clients, but I find it really interesting to look at my stories that way. And it is a tool in the toolbox. It is something that we can use, but it doesn't replace the human element. You're still going to need an editor to help you understand, is my dialogue working? So the AI can answer the question, how much dialogue do I have? What percentage of this narrative is dialogue?
And that is something that no human is going to go count. It would take so much time. It would not be worth our time and effort, but is an interesting data point that we can then use in our work with a human editor. And again, this is a company that I worked with before. That is why you'll see me listed on their website because they're also not trying to replace human editors. And that is something that you will see very prominently on their website. This is a tool. It is a form of analysis.
But you're still going to need to bring in a human for developmental editing to understand what is and isn't working in your story at a deeper level because ultimately that quantitative data is not as important as the qualitative experience that someone has reading your story. And that is why I am not super concerned about being replaced as an editor anytime soon, because when it comes to developmental editing, a computer cannot tell you if your book is going to make someone cry. A computer is not going to tell you if your book is working on a structural level in that a human reader is going to be intrigued and want to know what happens next. So if you're curious to know what percentage of this book is dialogue or you want to know what your average sentence length is or something like that, I think it was a helpful tool. It is information, but it is not going to completely take humans out of the editing process. And It's something that I think you can experiment with and choose to use on your own. But it is not something that I am going to necessarily bring into the editing process because
It's not my choice to make. When clients come to me for editing, they are coming for my expertise, my brain power, my insight into their stories, and that's what they're going to get. I'm never going to send someone the bot's opinion of their story. That's not what people pay me for. That would be disingenuous, it would be unethical, and it's not going to happen. When you hire me, you get my perspective, and that's it. And that perspective is built on a lot of practice as a developmental editor, on a lot of education. It is not built on what bots say, because in my experience, the bots don't have much to say that is actually worthwhile. That's my hot take for this episode. Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this episode's insight into how I am and am not using AI tools in my process. Like I said before, if you want to check out the tools that I've mentioned or learn more about dictation, I will link those resources below. And if you have a comment, if you want to let me know your opinion on AI tools, generative or otherwise, you can let me know. Message me on Instagram, I'm @oliviahelpswriters. If this triggered anything for you, talk to me. I would love to hear your perspective.
And if you have any insight into maybe something that I'm missing, something I don't know about AI that I should, let me know. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Better Writer podcast. I am so glad that you're here. So grateful that you took time out of your day to listen to me talk about writing. I hope you have a wonderful week.
Keep writing and keep getting better one word at a time. See ya.
