Spelling "Accidental" Without A-I

 

"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.

 

Editing is a craft and a skill, needing both a a good knowledge of Strunk and White as well as a basis in how text works, how humans read, how stories flow... how it all fits. It's not merely pushing words around on the line, or having a thesaurus at the ready, with likely mathematical frequency counts attached to every word. For the folks in the back, AI "works" by taking what it's been given and trending it towards an average of what it's been trained upon. It "knows" grammar and spelling by virtue of being trained and weighted on examples of good grammar and spelling. Shockingly, this is also how humans learn—and we truly do learn. We read examples, and we see the rules, and we apply them. With practice, we get better at them.

 

I suggest that we've been scarred and scared by too many years of severe teaching and not enough encouragement. We appear to be fully capable of expressing ourselves to each other, pausing when we need to, breaking up the sentences when we need to make a point. Changing rhythms. Beats. Landing the short, punctuating phrase in the middle of a longer digression to keep our audience/friend/Zoom buddy listening. We do this all the time, but I don't think a lot of use trust in our own ear, and our own ability. We panic. We think about old Mrs. So-and-So, our grammar teacher in the fourth grade, and we panic about commas and slip up on apostrophe's [sic] and utterly freeze up when we see a semicolon; semicolons are our friends, it's OK.

 

AI is breezily confident, with a corpus of experience and no grade school trauma to unpack. It's so fast! And yet it still somehow squeezes the life out of everything it touches. For prose, or art, or music, it cuts off our "fail, practice, improve" cycle and keeps us at zero growth. Worse, it keeps us at zero flaws. I love reading behind-the-scenes articles about art (fine, low, or pop) that I'm familiar with, and how some mistake lead to a chance discovery. ("The opening guitar riff was an accident in the mixing booth from a warmup session. The band liked it and kept it." "The actor flubbed their line and made their scene partner laugh. The director loved it and kept it.")

 

Yes, absolutely, typos and mistakes slip through the net. We are not machines, we should not imitate machines, and we should remember how poorly the machines imitate us before we hand off our trust to them. Did the incorrect "its vs. it's" usage I spotted in a recent trad-pubbed book ruin the story? No, because accidents happen. Multiply the number of hands and eyes a piece moved beneath before it made it to the world, and it's a miracle there aren't more mistakes.

 

We're a culture of immediate, immaculate results, high-dev ultra fine resolution everything, same-day delivery. But don't be in such a hurry to push art through an efficiency pipeline that's been polished smooth with billionaire bucks. Anything moving at that velocity must be streamlined or have its wings ripped off, and AI prose does not soar. It gets there rapidly, blandly, and unmemorably. It's sleek and smooth and inoffensive and immediate. It makes no mistakes because it was taught never to imitate the foibles of humans, only their best and most polished works.

Poor thing.

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