On AI as Your New Editor
Creatives and creators are both thrilled and terrified about what the new generation of AIs can do. Here's how I'm leveraging them to help my writing.
Pieter van Noordennen |
On AI as Your New Editor
As a creator and creative executive in the tech industry, I often find myself at a crossroads when it comes to utilizing the incredible new tools released every week.
I use GPT-4 as an editor, feeding it my content and asking it for improvements. (I ask it to emulate Joseph Mitchell’s editor William Shawn; I’m old-school like that).
The AI uses my words, my ideas, and my train of thought, but can restructure my 3,500-word, disconnected ramble into a succinct and well-structured post free of typos, grammatical errors, and omissions. For me, it’s removed the parts of editing I was bad at and didn’t enjoy in the first place.
But what does this mean for the future of writing and journalism? Will robots take over completely? Will we all be out of jobs soon? Not necessarily.
For one thing, these AI tools still need human input. I still need to provide the initial content, the ideas, the creativity. And even after the AI has done its editing magic, I still need to review and make sure the writing is true to my voice and style.
It’s a collaboration between human and machine, and, as has always been true of writing, revision is key to the final product. Further, while the copy is clean, the level of feedback and insight doesn’t get to the level of the many amazing editors I’ve worked with in the past.
Still, it’s hard to deny that LLMs are an essential tool for writing these days. It’s clear that AI tools are going to become more prevalent in the world of writing and journalism. And there are pros and cons to this.
On the one hand, AI tools can help us produce content more efficiently. They can help us catch mistakes and typos that we might have missed otherwise. And they can even help us generate ideas and topics to write about.
On the other hand, there’s the question of originality and creativity. Can an AI tool truly capture the voice and style of a human writer? Or will all writing start to sound the same? What happens when the whole world adopts AI and there are no new, truly original and human ideas?
Then there’s the ethical component. Is my content being improved by models built on questionable copyright practices, at the expense of the very writers, editors, and creators whom I look to for inspiration? What is their incentive to continue creating content?
It’s hard to say for sure what the long-term impact of AI on content creation will be. But for now, I’m embracing the collaboration between human and machine. I’m excited to see what new tools and technologies will emerge in this space, and how they’ll change the way we think about writing and creativity.
Personally, I plan to label articles where I’ve used AI assistance to maintain transparency and spark a conversation on the evolving relationship between human creativity and AI tools.
I’m curious to hear how you are using AI these days and how that squares with your own sense of self as a writer or creator.
GPT-4 helped (just a little) with the editing of the article.