AI for editing

[live4thebj]

Is any authors here using AI as a tool to edit your story? If yes what are you using?

 

[StillStunned]

Not me. Call me crazy, but I love the editing stage. It's where I hammer and polish my sentences and paragraphs into their final form, and where I add the foreshadowing and call-backs that make the story feel complete. No AI could do that.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Be careful with any AI tools. You could get your whole story rejected. I use Prowritingaid, but mainly to look at grammar and spelling. Occasionally I look at its suggestions for awkward sentences but I don't always take them. They don't always sound... realistic.

 

[Rob_Royale]

No. I'm with StillStunned. Editing is as important to me as the writing itself. I use free Grammarly for spelling and punctuation and that's it.

 

[Lumiere_Amie]

Be careful with AI, as has been said, your work might be rejected. There are multiple threads on this topic.
Like Rob_Royale, I use free Grammarly for spelling and punctuation. I rarely accept the editing suggestions.

 

[TheLobster]

Not me. Call me crazy, but I love the editing stage. It's where I hammer and polish my sentences and paragraphs into their final form, and where I add the foreshadowing and call-backs that make the story feel complete. No AI could do that.

I'm shocked — shocked! — that a professional editor would love the editing stage

 

[StillStunned]

I'm shocked — shocked! — that a professional editor would love the editing stage

If my stories required as much editing as my clients' texts do, or if they were as boring, I'd probably hate it.

 

[NoTalentHack]

It depends on what you mean by using "AI" and "editing." I use ProWritingAid for proofing--misplaced commas, misspelled words, etc.--but not really for editing in a major way. It gives some reports on various things the software thinks I'm doing wrong (too many adverbs, using "bad" dialogue tags, etc.), which I mostly ignore. There are some tools in it that I do use but wouldn't consider AI; for example, there's a tool that will spit out a report about how often you use words, and another that shows places where I've used the same word in close proximity. Both are relatively simple from a programming standpoint; I could write something that did it myself, if I really wanted to. Some would call those AI, but I wouldn't.

I occasionally use ChapGPT as a thesaurus or a sort of reverse dictionary. It's good for when a term is right on the tip of my tongue, where I can describe it and maybe even close cousins, but not "true" synonyms. Sometimes it works, but more often it just gives me words I've already thought about but discarded as not quite right. It's a good last resort, though.

What I don't do is use things like PWA's Spark, which generates story seeds or additional details for existing stories, nor do I use ChatGPT or the like to actually generate any text or to critique my text. The former I eschew because it's not fun; I'm writing because I want to write, so why would I have the computer do that for me? The latter, because AI is dumb as fuck; it's a jumped up autocomplete. It will write stuff that sounds good but doesn't actually tell you anything; as an experiment, I had it "critique" something of mine, a passage from a recent book by a well-reviewed author, and some piece of trash AI-written crap from Kindle Unlimited. The resulting outputs might as well have been the same.

 

[Britva415]

Is any authors here using AI as a tool to edit your story? If yes what are you using?

Are you having difficulty with your editing and looking for a solution to that?

On Lit, resorting to AI for that seems to be risky. I wonder whether there's a different question you might want to ask, regarding making editing easier.

 

[THBGato]

No.

Spell check on Google Docs, multiple re-reads, then the feedback of my lovely editor and various awesome beta readers.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Is any authors here using AI as a tool to edit your story? If yes what are you using?

I'd learn how to self-edit or find a human editor. Relying on anything other than a basic spell-check is high risk for an AI rejection these days.

Learning the fundamental rules of grammar, punctuation, and dialogue, and taking time to edit, is better in the long run, because it means you know what you're doing, rather than relying on a box of tricks.

 

[Voboy]

No.

I like using my brain. I don't know why I'd ever want to outsource that.

 

[haventgotaclue]

I use Grammarly and Quillbot to edit my stories.
Grammarly is good for catching grammar mistakes, and Quillbot is great for rephrasing.
For anyone interested in trying AI writing tools, here's a list: https://writingtools.co.uk/pricing.html. It mentions their prices and descriptions.

 

[TheLobster]

I use a basic spellchecker in my editor but nothing really to fix or improve the grammar. A bold strategy, I know, considering this isn't my first language, but I haven't got many complaints.

The downside is that I need to read through every submission like 4-5 times to catch "everything," and then I'll invariably still miss an extraneous or missing word or two...

 

[StillStunned]

The downside is that I need to read through every submission like 4-5 times to catch "everything," and then I'll invariably still miss an extraneous or missing word or two...

Have you tried using Read Aloud in Word? It can be mind-numbing (even if you set it to a higher speed), but if you do it properly - watch the grey highlight flit from word to word and don't let yourself be distracted - you'll catch almost every typo and omission.

 

[TheLobster]

Have you tried using Read Aloud in Word? It can be mind-numbing (even if you set it to a higher speed), but if you do it properly - watch the grey highlight flit from word to word and don't let yourself be distracted - you'll catch almost every typo and omission.

I don't use MS Word but I could probably rig Chrome with a TTS accessibility plugin to do it.

Thing is, I'm not reading through my writings purely for the sake of correcting misspellings and the like; I'm correcting a lot of what it is termed "flow" or "cadence" along the way (adding / removing words, splicing sentences differently, etc.). So this isn't really a very mechanical process, and TTS can't really help much since it always reads everything in a very monotonous, robotic pacing.

 

[mildlyaroused]

No, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you want to make your writing sound robotic. Even these various tasks you can give AI - make it funnier! Make it more varied! - are essentially falsities: they still sound like AI, and there's no way around that. I am continually astonished that people can't recognise AI writing, think it sounds good, or would even be interested in using it at all!

 

[StillStunned]

I don't use MS Word but I could probably rig Chrome with a TTS accessibility plugin to do it.

Thing is, I'm not reading through my writings purely for the sake of correcting misspellings and the like; I'm correcting a lot of what it is termed "flow" or "cadence" along the way (adding / removing words, splicing sentences differently, etc.). So this isn't really a very mechanical process, and TTS can't really help much since it always reads everything in a very monotonous, robotic pacing.

The UK English voice I use in Word isn't too bad, but I agree, the cadence isn't perfect. But that's something that you have to imagine for yourself while your listening.

 

[ElectricBlue]

No, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you want to make your writing sound robotic. Even these various tasks you can give AI - make it funnier! Make it more varied! - are essentially falsities: they still sound like AI, and there's no way around that. I am continually astonished that people can't recognise AI writing, think it sounds good, or would even be interested in using it at all!

I agree. It's the same incredulity I have that people can't see the claws nor count the fingers in visual AI junk. The crapness of AI written content jumps off the page at me. Sometimes I wonder how some people read, to be honest, that they don't seem to see the signs.

 

[Jmanchu]

*Suggestions and insights* for grammar or possible sentence structures or issues on pacing? Or throwing in different versions of the same edit YOU WROTE YOURSELF and asking for different possible thoughts on them? Maybe.

Finding and learning new words and synonyms that you can ask based on a fitting definition given to it, like an interactive thesaurus/dictionary? Yes.

As a direct editor to copy/paste the AI edit after? Or writing out parts of your story as a "helping cowriter?" NO. Never direct editing using AI, even if just for technical stuff on your writing like grammar and better sentence structure. Even Grammarly apparently can give people AI rejection issues based on all the anecdotal AI rejection stories out there. Bad idea in my opinion.

 

[oksideshow859419]

I'm not really an author 1 out ±25 of my stories I sent in was accepted because of I was using Microsoft Copilot to proofread and edit my short stories. The main reason is because the ai editing was replacing too much of my original. When it comes down to the writing a story in any form I'll be the first to say that I truly suck at it. I barely passed middle school and high school English but anyways my imagination is boundless when it comes to the outside world I don't really give a Frak what happens don't get me wrong I'm not a introvert its 50/50 balance. I have several gigabytes of data of my writings, ideas art ideas as well etc. I stop trying to submit my works to the literotica website, I guess I am a better reader than a writer and I still get my phone to use read aloud for that lol