OK – AI could write a book for you, providing you give it a really good brief, but most authors want to produce something more original than any AI can produce. Remember, AI doesn’t create original ideas – it gathers information and presents it in response to your prompt. That means it’s all been done before!
So, maybe getting it to edit your book, instead of investing a few thousand pounds in a professional editor, would be a brilliant idea. You’re giving it original text, all it has to do is improve it.
WRONG!
AI simply doesn’t behave like a professional development editor. It won’t ask you those critical questions that will enable them to polish your book to totally hit the spot for your ideal reader.
It will tidy up your copy, fix your punctuation (not always correctly) and pick up typos and misspellings. But it won’t look at it conceptually.
Does that mean you should avoid AI like the plague?
No. AI can be really useful, with the right prompts.
It will help you to do your planning, tell it what you’ve got so far and ask it if you’ve missed anything critical.
If you’ve already got your chapter plan, it can help you to find appropriate information to add to your research, quotations that are relevant, etc.
When you’re written a chapter, you can ask it to review it and make suggestions – not edit it. You’re looking for gaps, not corrections.
Don’t give it the whole book, it will use up your credits and take much longer for your chosen AI to process it.
What AI doesn’t do
It doesn’t think like your ideal reader, even if you tell it to – because it’s not a reader.
It doesn’t see where you’ve overdone an explanation and ended up confusing the issue. It might suggest a rewrite that doesn’t make sense in the bigger picture.
It doesn’t always see how expanding an anecdote or story would make your point better.
It doesn’t look at chapter two and see how that bit would work much better in chapter five.
It doesn’t tell you that your reader is going to struggle to follow your thought processes without more clarity. It’s much more likely to tell you complimentary things, even if it suggests amendments – and won’t always explain why your ideas are great, but need more work for the reader to get them as an ‘Aha’ moment.
I’ve seen the results of AI editing – and it’s not good, even though it’s constantly evolving. The wit and wisdom got lost in a lot of unnecessary fluff.
