The Real You

Like plenty of other creatively-oriented people, I’ve been watching AI enter the writing and publishing realm with dread. I understand that this technology has incredible uses and potential (I say perfunctorily) in terms of the climate crisis and medicine. But as a member of a large consortium of independent (or freelance) editors who built careers at the major publishing houses, I’ve heard stories of clients using AI that made my jaw hit the floor. Can AI do the work that we editors do? For free? In one minute?

A friend and client who works regularly with an HPE editor admitted to me in a phone call that she’d been using AI to assess her writing. She’d even inputted her editor’s letters and asked AI to predict how he’d react to her revisions. She is the sort of person you might call an early adopter, and she got on board with AI immediately out of curiosity. She has published two novels, one with St. Martin’s and another with John Hunt Publishing. I’m not using her name out of respect for her wish for privacy.

I was surprised and angry when she told me what she’d been doing, and I told her so. I don’t live (entirely) under a rock. I know that writers of all stripes rely on AI in various ways, but I heard a kind of glee and adoration of AI in her voice. And I hated the idea that she’d input our intellectual property into the maw of this beast that had already illegally consumed so much.

“What made you start using AI as an editor?” I asked her.

She explained that she’d never had trouble coming up with ideas or unfurling a plot, but she’d always been plagued by a sense that her work was clunky on a line level. Labored. AI had been so useful in the workplace for her. “It really helped me tighten and polish my professional writing,” she said, and she figured it could do the same for her fiction.

When it did prove useful in this way, she asked it to assess her writing more broadly: “For instance, I might write a scene in which I wanted the character to be petty, and I’d ask it more specifically, ‘In these two paragraphs, does this character sound petty? Or, is there enough tension in this scene?’”

Ok, I got how she was using Claude, but why?

“I really hate asking people to read for me, and then read this draft again, but some writers have a kind of insecurity and craving for immediate feedback. It became almost an addictive thing,” she admitted. This told me that some latent need was being not only met, but fed. Encouraged.

Still, I understood that one. Writing is a solitary, seemingly endless process in which we are locked in a room with our own minds. Who wouldn’t want a non-human entity to reassure us before exposing our work to humans?

Then I panicked. I imagined all my clients enjoying warm and fuzzy rapports with Claude and then ghosting me and the other two editors at HPE. And this is likely why I threw every argument I could at her: data centers’ threats to the environment; widespread job losses; moral issues (“This is cheating,” I told her); the rise of income inequality. Nothing moved the needle for her, so I pressed on: “Imagine being on book tour. How would you answer questions about your writing process? Would you admit that you rely on AI?” Nothing. I heard myself become more desperate, but I couldn’t give up.

I’d read her recent work, and while it was well-done in a generic, superficial way, while it may have flowed more than her unedited work, it did not in fact sound like her. When I told her this, she stopped. “What do you mean?” Finally, I had hit a nerve.

“It’s not you. I know you and I know your voice, and this wasn’t you.”

She sounded stricken, and I felt guilty for having pushed to this point (guilt being my default state), but also resolved in what I’d done. This was important, and I needed to take a stand, even with just one client.

We spoke for a little longer and said goodbye. I tried to silence my nagging guilt and focus on the feeling that maybe I had gotten somewhere.

We didn’t speak for a while, maybe a few weeks, and when I next saw her, I asked her how the writing was going.

Her face brightened. “Great! I’m rewriting everything.” Her tone had changed in a way that surprised me.

I asked her to fill me in on what had had transpired that last heated talk.

“I was very conflicted,” she said. “I was defensive with my own self. I really wasn’t sure, and so I started asking AI about it, which is ironic. And then I started writing without AI to see the difference. I used some AI detectors to see what they thought. Some of them thought my writing was 100% AI, and some guessed 20%. Apparently my voice sounds like AI’s.”

“Oy,” I said.

“I started really looking at what AI does and what it did to my writing, how it changed things,” she went on. “I thought, wait a second…this doesn’t sound like me. Of course some sentences were obviously mine (those that were quirky or rougher). They were definitely mine. But I could really tell the difference.”

“It was that obvious?”

“I could really see it. Initially I thought I’d sounded like a better version of myself. But when I went back and began to rewrite, to really let my words flow the way they flow, I began to see the difference. It was like realizing that I’d gotten a bad facelift. Eventually I began to have a gut feeling about the whole thing, and I really cringed at myself, and this writing. Who knows if this book will get published, and so what’s the point if I just have AI correct every sentence? Where is the me in it? My writing has to sound like me. If it’s not sounding like me, it’s not me, and it’s not what I want to produce.”

I asked her to tell me more, and she did:

“AI might have helped my writing get tighter in some ways. I don’t think that some of the cutting is all bad. I often ramble. But it over-polishes and it’s terrible with metaphors and similes and it repeats patterns too much, as in ‘it’s not this, but it’s that.’

Going through this whole thing helped me figure out that I do really value my voice. It’s funny, because my whole life has been a battle against insecurity of one sort or another. When I was growing up, I didn’t have a voice. I ended up hospitalized for depression. I definitely had a repressed self.

It’s funny how deeply important my own voice is to me, and I think because in one way or another, it has been repressed by a host of people and cultures and other elements. Not so much now, not in my late 60s, who the cares anymore, right? But it all of a sudden became apparent: wait a second, my voice is all I have. This process for me is about me, and what do I have if I don’t have my voice when I’ve actually fought for that my whole life?

My whole history has been a fight to be okay with myself. And my writing is my most insecure place. I’m not insecure about work or being a mother or a grandmother. For a while, AI really made me feel more confident, but at what cost? Not losing my voice is more important than anything else. This goes for my voice as a person and a writer, but also as a mother and teacher and grandmother and friend.”

It all got her thinking about the definition of art and whether hiring a freelance editor was cheating. She decided that it was not. “You need other people to bounce stuff off.”

As a writer, I myself have never relied on independent editors, but I have traded work with friends. As an independent editor, I’ve sometimes struggled with feeling like I’m helping writers cheat somehow, but I’ve come to think that my role is more a saver of friendships and spousal relationships. (No writer should overly rely on those around them for input.) And I am more of a teacher and suggester than a rewriter. My goal is to get writers to sound more like themselves, to learn the right questions to ask themselves, and to learn to more deeply trust their own intuitions. Maybe this is justification, but I’m proud of what I do and thoroughly enjoy it.

I asked this writer to compare working with AI and humans as editors.

“AI just doesn’t have the depth and scope that a human does. It doesn’t provide the human emotional depth that you need when you really need help reworking something. AI can be a valuable tool for small picture line edits, but for bigger picture edits and getting an emotional reaction to what I’m really trying to do, an editor is much better.”

I had to ask, “Do I detect an urge to start using it again for that line-level tightening and polishing?”

“No. I don’t use it now,” she said. “I’m sort of scared of it in this weird way. Will I go and ask it research questions? I’ve asked it some, but only for research.”

I asked her if she had any advice for writers who are considering trying out AI’s editing functions.

“You just have to be really careful and aware of what it’s doing. It’s easy to get trapped and it’s fun to talk to it all the time. It always wants to please you.

If you do end up using it, take a step back afterward, a week or two, and then look at it again. For me, there was this gut-sinking feeling that this just doesn’t sound like me. You have to know yourself. I think I learned a really valuable lesson about my own voice, what it sounds like and why it matters.

Still, I’m not anti-AI. I understand why people would be drawn to it, for sure. I think there are good uses. But in terms of writing—this is about authenticity.”

I give her a world of credit for being open with me and open to changing her thinking.

It’s common knowledge that AI will get better, and maybe in the future it will come to mimic our true voices better. But for me, the preservation of this person’s—and my own—true voice matters. I enjoy putting down my own weird self on the page. Sometimes it’s a lonely process and sometimes I sound messy or lost on the page, and I so rarely feel that a piece is done, but there’s value in the fact that it was produced by me.

And so I’m going to continue to lean into my own flawed human self as both a writer and an editor. I myself think that imperfection and uniqueness will become more valuable in the future. Won’t we all start to sound the same if we let another entity think, revise, write, create for us?