The rapid spread of AI tools following the release of ChatGPT has sent shockwaves through industries, job markets, schools and the media, generating fear of job loss, doomsday predictions, confusion and, here and there, glimmers of hope and excitement.
This webinar examines the current state of AI tools as they apply to editors. The first part will consider how to edit AI-assisted or generated text, setting aside ethical considerations (Is it plagiarism? Is it fair for an author to say it is their own work?) and focusing on pragmatic strategies for editing. The focus will be on the current limits of these tools and where they are likely to fall down, such as AI hallucination, contrast with authorial voice, lack of evaluative ability, and generic text, as well as their strong suits – grammar, punctuation, sentence structure and effortless generation. The second part examines how editors can put AI tools to work for themselves. The presentation will include live demonstrations of workflows and features to make our work easier, from communicating with clients, to parsing tangled sentences, and having passages of jargon translated, generating ideas for titles and coming up with missing concepts or counter-arguments to a text.
Instructor
Perrin Lindelauf is a freelance editor, author, and tech enthusiast. He wrote and edited travel guidebooks for National Geographic during ten years of work in Japan, but now he calls the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island his home, where he does structural and copy editing from a lively coworking space. He’s been eagerly exploring the latest AI tools as they have developed to both satisfy his curiosity and to plot the trajectory of the editing industry going forward.