I was recently looking at writing a book (to be published on-demand/online--like Kindle Direct Publishing, etc.), and was thinking about how I would afford to enlist the services of a copyeditor to clean up the manuscript. It turns out that independent copyeditors serving micro-published authors are apparently just about to be "out of business", to be replaced by ChatGPT:
https://thejohnfox.com/2023/04/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-copyedit-your-book/
I have to say I'm glad I'm not an independent copyeditor. C'est la vie!
But for those that have been harboring secret thoughts of publishing a book, the costs and logistics are now much lower/easier...and interactive.
Chris
https://thejohnfox.com/2023/04/how-to-use-chatgpt-to-copyedit-your-book/
I have to say I'm glad I'm not an independent copyeditor. C'est la vie!
But for those that have been harboring secret thoughts of publishing a book, the costs and logistics are now much lower/easier...and interactive.
Chris
Four questions one must bear in mind before engaging in writing a story, to be published as a book (to be precise):
1 Do you have a story to tell, really? Non-fiction or fiction the same.
2 Can you tell a story? Do you have something 'to reveal'? Have you lived through it?
3 Can you write? Flawless. Is it yours or someone/something else property?
4 Anyone interested? It's your story, not theirs.
With four yesses, engage. On your own risk.
The slush pile at reknown publishers desks is unsurmountable, 99% utter crap.
1 Do you have a story to tell, really? Non-fiction or fiction the same.
2 Can you tell a story? Do you have something 'to reveal'? Have you lived through it?
3 Can you write? Flawless. Is it yours or someone/something else property?
4 Anyone interested? It's your story, not theirs.
With four yesses, engage. On your own risk.
The slush pile at reknown publishers desks is unsurmountable, 99% utter crap.
*Flawlessly. Sorry... I couldn't resist.
I find it entertaining how the sky is always falling when new technologies emerge. In the 1980s it was the robots that were to make everybody unemployed. Then I think it was computers (except the Y2K scare). Now AI.
There're many examples of writing that could just as well be done by AI or even a simple command line script. Take business or sports reporting for example. "The DOW was up X points and the dollar down Y cents". "Team A beat team B in a surprise overtime win". Does that really need human involvement? Same for legalese, honestly.
My concerns around AI are more how the generated content is used. For example, Shopify now offers to have AI generate product descriptions. That makes me a bit uneasy. What am I buying then if I decide to buy that product? But I suppose it's like any tool. It can be used as a helping hand (starting point for product description) or as a tool of malice. Just as a hammer can be used to pound in a nail or to pound someone over the head.
Tom
You've scared me. For a moment, I was thinking that ChatGPT is the perfect proofreader and would catch all the mistakes. But then I read the article, and it says that it is only 70% accurate, 80% maybe. So there is nothing to worry about. It will not change the experience that any author has been accustomed to since the Gutemberg invention. You open with trepidation the envelope that the publisher just sent to you, and put your hand inside. It's there, finally. The first copy of your book. The one you've read again and again countless times to make perfect, and to remove even the smallest flaw. It has then professionally checked by someone hired by the publisher to purge even the last defect. You then open the book at a random page, just to feel the pleasure of reading your work that has been finally put on the place it deserves. Aaand is there. That's a grammar error. A very noticeable grammar error, indeed. Dammit!
You didn't read far enough...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Luddism
I think it's like anything else nowadays--the new technology changes the face of the business practices, but many of the people that were accustomed to the old processes adapt to the new. But it's probably a good bet that many fewer independent copyeditors (humans) will be needed in the short term. But if everyone decides to write a book, who knows? Maybe the net effect will increase the ranks of those that used to be called "copyeditors". ✍️
Not sure who you're directing that at. Music isn't actually the subject of interest...but better hi-fi reproduction of music is likely a good bet. I actually tire of doing the same thing over and over (free) for guys who all complain that there are no good resources to learn how to do it themselves. Writing it down is a reasonable alternative to that continuing practice.
Chris
I recently noticed a pair of vintage Seas woofers on a certain auction site. I think the model was 17FGWB. They dated from the eighties I believe. Anyway, I clicked on the description, and was met with a detailed description of how they were fullrange units, and the cones were made with graphene. The name stood for Fullrange Graphene Woofer and Beyond, it said. I messaged the seller and asked politely where his information came from. (I actually thought it was an April fool!) He messaged back straight away - he'd asked an AI about them.
So beware!
I told my son (who is in sofware engineering) the story, and he just said, yeah, that's what AIs do, make stuff up. So copyediting? I'm not sure!
So beware!
I told my son (who is in sofware engineering) the story, and he just said, yeah, that's what AIs do, make stuff up. So copyediting? I'm not sure!
I'm not sure that the term "copyediting" is widely understood here: it is the drudgery (repeating) work of looking for spelling and grammar errors of a submitted text and proposing fixes to them. That's it. No "story synthesis" anywhere. That's the job of the author.
The job of proposing major re-writes in order to achieve a potential book publishing contract is what a publishing agent does. Nowadays, you can bypass both of these roles if you don't care about becoming a best-selling author (which I don't). The drudgery is taken by the AI, and the agent's role is not needed at all--you publish the book yourself on an individual sales basis. No overhead, and very low costs to the author. Anonymity is insured, however, for books on those obscure subjects--like audio...
Chris
The job of proposing major re-writes in order to achieve a potential book publishing contract is what a publishing agent does. Nowadays, you can bypass both of these roles if you don't care about becoming a best-selling author (which I don't). The drudgery is taken by the AI, and the agent's role is not needed at all--you publish the book yourself on an individual sales basis. No overhead, and very low costs to the author. Anonymity is insured, however, for books on those obscure subjects--like audio...
Chris
No problem, it would not be a normal conjugation in my language.*Flawlessly. Sorry... I couldn't resist.
An AI transator could not help you with 'foutloos' (= ok) and 'foutloosheid' (= ridiculous).
I surely would not write a story in english, but I do admire some grammer rules nevertheless.
And I do not use a translation service for postings here.
I remember back in probably very early 80s as a teen watching a BBC documentary on 'expert systems*'. Like anything trying to be futuristic it had the voltage contrast microscopy film of a working IC and a Philip Glass arpeggio hell sound track. And it said the usual about doctors and oil exploration being taken over by said expert systems. It also showed a demo of the latest from IBM which was a word processor that underlined spelling mistakes in one colour and grammatical errors in a different colour. I was reminded this when MS introduced grammar hints into word with exactly the same colour scheme as IBM had used a couple of decades earlier.
So if you use a word processor it has already used AI to check your spelling and grammar. Personally if it's not a joint document like a bid or a tech spec I like to keep in some of my personal idioms in my written work so I ignore the grammar pedant in my laptop most of the time.
I note whilst I have been typing you've slightly shifted the goalposts. 'Tidied up for conciseness' will very much depend on the type of work being written and the target audience so I would suspect humans might well beat computers at that still.
Would be interesting to see how the copyeditor would take to an Ian M banks book...
*Expert systems are another branch of AI are were overhyped then just merged in mainstream products and we don't hear about them, like fuzzy logic.
Well I'll raise your quote with this, from the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading:
"Copyediting is professional help to make a text ready for publication by ensuring that it's clear, consistent, correct and complete."
And how about this, from nybookeditors.com: "Copyediting is the process of checking for mistakes, inconsistencies, and repetition."
I used to work as an editor on Wall Street, and it's a job I'm more than happy to pass off to the robots. To this day I catch errors in pretty much every news article I read, including the New York Times and you name it, and haven't stopped making errors myself. It's a crap job unless you're pathologically, sadistically pedantic, as some of my colleagues were. People who write well and think well are people who read a lot at a very high level and there's no substitute for that. Grammatical errors are the least of anyone's problems.
That said, concerning AI - the sky is falling. If I have to argue that to you guys, then I'm sure I won't change your mind, so let's not talk about it. But have you looked outside your window in the past couple years?
AI is very good at doing machine-like things, such as coding. It's terrible at doing human-like things, and always will be - partly because people are also terrible at doing human things. All AI does is clumsily repeat what others have done, and the kinds of things they do. It's not going to be worse at coding than a giant room full of geeks, and it's not going to be better at writing music than the average person. Intelligence is not the variable that makes things good or bad. We are blind to our own biases about why we consider things 'good' or 'intelligent.' In any case, what is called "AI" is not intelligence by any stretch of the definition.
That said, concerning AI - the sky is falling. If I have to argue that to you guys, then I'm sure I won't change your mind, so let's not talk about it. But have you looked outside your window in the past couple years?
AI is very good at doing machine-like things, such as coding. It's terrible at doing human-like things, and always will be - partly because people are also terrible at doing human things. All AI does is clumsily repeat what others have done, and the kinds of things they do. It's not going to be worse at coding than a giant room full of geeks, and it's not going to be better at writing music than the average person. Intelligence is not the variable that makes things good or bad. We are blind to our own biases about why we consider things 'good' or 'intelligent.' In any case, what is called "AI" is not intelligence by any stretch of the definition.
That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me nervous. I wonder how an AI can be expected to reliably describe a product accurately, rather than just make up something that sounds like it fits (as clearly happened in the example I mentioned above.)
It's tough enough already, sifting out good info from 'alternative facts', online. That's only going to get harder, I fear.
It's actually pretty sad when you think about what kind of environment doesn't even allow the reporters to run a grammar and/or spell checker. I don't believe journalism has anywhere near same the expertise it once had...when it actually reported news. From Teacher's Pet (1958, Clark Gable as Jim Gannon):
(...and preferably within the first two or three sentences...) If the story I'm reading doesn't answer the six basic interrogatives within the first paragraph, I move on to the next story. I get through the news in very short order nowadays.
Chris
Certainly malice is a problem, but I'm as concerned about 'accidental' problems (to push the hammer analogy, I once accidentally hit my thumb with a hammer, hard enough to make it bleed).
Let's explore the possibilities. Ask ChatGPT (or another such as Google Bard that I've used lately) some specific questions about a topic you know really well, which for Tom might be composite amplifiers. Go through all the output and see what's right and what's off the wall. I imagine it would talk about stability and how "finicky" it is to achieve with two cascaded amplifiers. But it might also say something about composite materials, which has no connection to the topic, even though it may be an interesting topic on its own.
Keep in mind that it will give about the same proportion of right and wrong answers on any topic, and if you're not that familiar with the topic, you could easily be fooled into believing something that's not true. These are fun and fascinating toys, but I won't rely on them for any important knowledge or work.
Remember I'm talking about just the copyediting engine of ChatGPT here guys...
No need to vent about the "synthesis" (i.e., controversial) portions of the tool. I find it interesting that there is so much angst on this subject.
What I was mainly interested in was one of its non-controversial capabilities that was apparently developed to be the back-end to format the assembled subject snips that its search engine finds and prioritizes for a response to a user. That back-end portion of the tool is apparently much better than the older copyediting tools/apps that copyeditors have been using that preceded it.
Chris
No need to vent about the "synthesis" (i.e., controversial) portions of the tool. I find it interesting that there is so much angst on this subject.
What I was mainly interested in was one of its non-controversial capabilities that was apparently developed to be the back-end to format the assembled subject snips that its search engine finds and prioritizes for a response to a user. That back-end portion of the tool is apparently much better than the older copyediting tools/apps that copyeditors have been using that preceded it.
Chris