Rhino Puzzlings

  "AI doesn’t make mistakes," says the hypothetical author who ships off their hard-labored manuscript to a discount editing service. "It has better grammar and spelling and punctuation and is faster and cheaper than a human editor. And no errors, that's what does it for me. I bought a book and there's a obvious typo in it! AI wouldn't do that." Maybe that's true, for a loose definition of "mistake." If it rewrites your text and phrases, is that a mistake? If it corrects intentional dialect and character grammatical errors, is that a mistake? "Yes and yes," I say after these clever leading questions. "Assuming it would do an equivalent job as a trained, experienced human was the original mistake, the ur-goof  in this comedy. Editing is not spell checking, it's not applying normalized grammar rules, and it's not pureeing the life out of prose to convert it into visual baby food, textureless and uniformly bland. ...

It's lonesome in the muck. Or perhaps I should say  in the slop  as that's the tide indie authors are battling now. It's not exclusively indies, but indie creatives of all types are the Bellwether of Bad News. The ink is barely dry on the Shy Girl AI controversy before a Canadian legislator Bill Oliver decided to not do his own homework before standing up and giving his book report, prompt and all, out loud, before cameras and constituents. Whoopsie. Full confession, I work in tech for my day job, and I'm using this tech on a daily basis. The standard that I'm holding myself to is to keep it away from "art" and more generally, creativity. I am fine(ish) using the tools to perform grueling scut work and tedious, unrewarding technical chores. If my career placed me in a kitchen, AI would be relegated to the washing-dishes and emptying-the-trash duties, the necessary, messy side-effects of serving humanity. It doesn't get to cook, it doesn't invent ...