ChatGPT. Gemini. NVIDIA. No doubt, these and other artificial intelligence (AI) assistants are revolutionizing the way we live our lives; they are revolutionizing the fields of medicine, banking, business, and communications; and they are revolutionizing academia. This is not necessarily a bad development.
What’s bad is viewing AI as more than a tool and letting it do our thinking for us.
The American Psychological Association puts it well:
As artificial intelligence [] tools proliferate, the goals of ethical research and writing remain the same: to be transparent, preserve the integrity of authorship, and verify reported findings. What’s changed is that AI can provide somewhat of an assist as long as researchers and students retain rigorous oversight.
A study by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Wellesley College suggests that students who used AI to write their papers for them accumulated “cognitive debt.” They didn’t remember what they had written because—wait for it, wait for it—they didn’t write it!
In American Nurse, a blog post says that writing produced by generative AI is often biased, can produce information that is not true and is outdated, could be unintentionally plagiarizing, and “lacks the depth and understanding of context compared to humans.”
AI editing tools have been around for a long time. Have you ever used Microsoft Word spellcheck? Grammarly? PerfectIt? All AI.
A 2024 article from the University of Chicago, arguably a national center of editing (think Chicago Manual of Style, University of Chicago Press), is titled “The Changing Face of Editing.” In that piece, the author recognizes the merits of AI as a tool, yet he also says this:
But while AI can identify patterns and apply rules, it continues to struggle with the contextual understanding that defines expert editing. An AI might flag a sentence as grammatically incorrect when it’s deliberately breaking convention for effect, or suggest changes that lessen the impact of a distinctive voice. These limitations clearly illuminate why human editors remain indispensable.
Ultimately, you want your words, whether they come in the form of a book, a pamphlet, a dissertation, a research paper, or a PowerPoint presentation, to be the best they can be. For that, you need a human editor.
