Sad news about Inkitt’s pivot to AI, but not surprising. My mom edits (used to edit?) for Galatea, which involved practically rewriting poorly written stories line by line to make them grammatical and readable. Now that work has completely dried up. There may be some work in the future for people to clean up AI-generated text for this platform, but one thing generative AI doesn’t do so much is make grammatical mistakes or ill-formed sentences. The stories she cleaned up may have been messy, but they were human. (They were also largely variations on werewolf erotica, in case anyone is wondering what secret storytelling formula Inkitt has found to keep people glued to their screens all that time.)
Interesting! Well, yeah, Wattpad is a thing she might look at; my Mom actually met her best friend on it (just as readers). I don't know how much AI-tooling has infiltrated there yet, though. Ideally substantive editing of AI cliche would become a new job for real people? (I admit I'm pretty tired of places with active community content creation being tossed about by money-hungry execs. Like Reddit. And everything else.)
I don’t know if I’d call that “ideal,” but I’m sure plenty of traditional editing jobs are being turned into AI-cleanup jobs (often in less time for less pay, but just as much work). As an editor myself, it’s work I refuse to do. But I also call it writing, not editing. If you’re bringing the author’s ideas out, no matter how garbled or poorly expressed, that’s editing. (Or maybe ghostwriting.) If there is no author and no ideas, and you have to put some in to give soul to some cliched generated text, that’s writing.
Great roundup as always @lynn!
Thanks Victor! I'm glad it's useful!
Sad news about Inkitt’s pivot to AI, but not surprising. My mom edits (used to edit?) for Galatea, which involved practically rewriting poorly written stories line by line to make them grammatical and readable. Now that work has completely dried up. There may be some work in the future for people to clean up AI-generated text for this platform, but one thing generative AI doesn’t do so much is make grammatical mistakes or ill-formed sentences. The stories she cleaned up may have been messy, but they were human. (They were also largely variations on werewolf erotica, in case anyone is wondering what secret storytelling formula Inkitt has found to keep people glued to their screens all that time.)
Wattpad could be worth a look, though!
Interesting! Well, yeah, Wattpad is a thing she might look at; my Mom actually met her best friend on it (just as readers). I don't know how much AI-tooling has infiltrated there yet, though. Ideally substantive editing of AI cliche would become a new job for real people? (I admit I'm pretty tired of places with active community content creation being tossed about by money-hungry execs. Like Reddit. And everything else.)
I don’t know if I’d call that “ideal,” but I’m sure plenty of traditional editing jobs are being turned into AI-cleanup jobs (often in less time for less pay, but just as much work). As an editor myself, it’s work I refuse to do. But I also call it writing, not editing. If you’re bringing the author’s ideas out, no matter how garbled or poorly expressed, that’s editing. (Or maybe ghostwriting.) If there is no author and no ideas, and you have to put some in to give soul to some cliched generated text, that’s writing.
Fair enough - back in my day we used to call it substantive editing, but i agree, in the case of rewriting AI text, it's probably more.