Taming Technology: AI Copy Editing in Publishing - No One Size Fits All
Hilde van Zeeland · Editorial Office News · 2023
Over the last decade, we've seen a quick uptake of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in publishing.AI is used to facilitate a range of tasks, from presubmission text revision to post-editing quality control.But while most AI solutions are generic, most publishers have their own norms when it comes to language, style, and editing.Can an AI solution account for such publisherspecific needs? AI concerns at the ISMTE Global EventThe last ISMTE Global Event in November 2022 included a session titled "I AM EDITOR -AI in publishing."In it, I presented Writefull's AI services for publishers, like its APIs for copy editing and language scoring.After the talk, some attendees wondered about the limitations of AI, in particular considering its generic output.Some of the questions asked were:Attendees' main concern seemed to be: to what extent can an AI language model meet publisher-specific needs, such as following style guides or refraining from changing the author's voice?This reflects the position of many publishers with whom we work."Yes, we would like to use an AI solution to facilitate our work, but we only want it to do A and B-and not C and D." This is a valid concern.In the end, if an AI cannot follow instructions, if it doesn't align very closely with what a human copy editor or scorer would do, it may hinder rather than facilitate.And this is the crux.An AI model can be trained on texts before and after copy editing, but unless the training data are tailored to the needs of a particular publisher, its output will always be generic.It will learn to fix common language errors, but the edits may be too few, too many, or simply stylistically different from what any given publisher appreciates.