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Comment by cornholio

10 hours ago

I think this kind of feedback is a good example of something an LLM is very good at suggesting. I regularly feed my important raw texts to an AI, and ask it not to rewrite it (!), but to give me line by line grammatical, style and tone advice, point out uncommon language, idioms or semantics etc. Also, they are good at fact checking, they can quickly verify each statement against web sources etc.

On the other hand, LLMs are very bad writing partners, they are sycophants and very rarely give substantial criticism, the kind of feedback an editor would give and is mentioned in the article.

This is the substantial service an editor will provide going forward in the AI slop era, where everyone and their grandma will self publish some personal masterpiece: a contact with the real world and setting the bar high, to the point you need to struggle to achieve the required quality. Writing a book, especially finishing a great book, is not supposed to be enjoyable, it's hard, grueling work.