It’s March 2025, and in offering to write a piece about AI, I run the risk of becoming outdated as I type. From what I can tell, the response to generative AI’s influence on writing and editing ranges from gratitude for its time-saving measures to annoyance at its errors to outright panic at its potential to reshape the editing field (and the practice of writing and critical thinking more generally).
Disguising the use of AI
More than once, people have asked me to evaluate whether their essays look human-authored as they admit, with shocking sincerity, that they copied and pasted sections directly from ChatGPT. Fed up with this barrage of AI-written assignments, professors at many institutions are adapting syllabi by including in-class essays or assignments that ask students to critically evaluate ChatGPT’s often error-riddled, biased and/or deceptive syntheses of academic articles.
Accusations of AI use
On LinkedIn, I witness copywriters sharing “tips and tricks” to make your writing seem more human. Increasingly, clients feed the content they receive through AI detectors that purport the existence of AI-generated text even when the copywriters insist that no AI was used. So, these tips and tricks offer ways to beat the machine and authenticate your writing as human-made. And in some of my discussions with prospective clients, they allude to their suspicion that their previous editor used AI to complete the job.
In my opinion, this is one of the more sinister effects of AI — finger-pointing resulting in humans needing to justify that their intellectual work has come from their own human brain (a phrase that we may have once red-lined as redundant). In fairness, it may also be true that some honest university students are accused of AI-informed plagiarism amid the very real prevalence of this practice among undergraduates.
Responding to the fear of AI
There is a sense of alarm among some editors in online forums. Fear is, of course, a human response to change. Yet the intention of this piece is not to be alarmist. There are other possible responses to change, including finding the humour in it. Many editors love making fun of the punctuation errors found throughout ChatGPT’s sentences expounding its confidence as a language processor. In November, the Writers Guild of Canada posted this list of ChatGPT’s attempts to rewrite some of the most iconic lines from beloved Canadian TV shows. Lists like these serve as wonderful examples of ChatGPT’s (poor) potential as a line editor. (Consider, e.g., its suggested dialogue for Mark McKinney’s head-crusher skit for Kids in the Hall: “Prepare for a head crunch!”)
The value of a human editor
Yes, AI models will improve given their continuous learning structure, but as so many of my editing colleagues point out, editing is more than perfecting grammar. Editors help writers find their voices; read for cultural bias; determine structures that enhance flow, entertainment, or argumentation; ensure recipes are safe and intuitive; develop character and narrative arcs and assess when rules of grammar should be broken and why.
Human editors ensure a document has a meaningful centre, a heartbeat, for lack of a better word.
I believe this is what one writer who approached me a few months ago was looking for. They had run their memoir through Grammarly, and while it seemed grammatically correct, something was missing. They said it felt flat. In my developmental edit, I noted moments in the memoir where emotion felt sparse, and I discussed how to develop the writer’s characterization so the reader would want to spend time with them. I also helped the writer balance how to speak with care about both the good and bad decisions they had made throughout their life. In other words, the edit focused on ensuring that the real mess and nuance of embodied lived experience was informing the sentence and not simply the rules of grammar. I believe this is important for good writing in all genres.
The future of editing
Some people’s jobs are more at risk than others — indeed, perhaps even mine in ways I cannot foresee. I am, though, reminded of how the publishing industry felt sure that e-books would spell disaster, only to see e-book sales almost permanently plateau. Some people like reading e-books; many others do not.
Change is certainly afoot, but it always is. There still exists the possibility that, “at worst, we’re looking at an Ontario situation.”
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Previous post from Holly Vestad: Free (or Cheap) Tools for Freelance Editors: Part 2
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Holly Vestad
Holly Vestad is a freelance editor specializing in memoir and non-fiction based on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. She has an MA in English literature and has held many writing workshops in the university setting. She is also a writing tutor at the McGill Writing Centre and the chair of Editors Canada’s career builder committee.