In the past several years, AI-powered developmental editing platforms such as AutoCrit, Editrix, and Anthropic’s Claude have emerged with the promise to make the revisions process faster and more accessible. Though automation has yet to meaningfully disrupt the editorial landscape, its potential has not gone unnoticed by the publishing industry. In PW’s most recent salary and jobs report (see p. 10), 63% of survey respondents said their companies are using AI in some way, though most are not enthused about what the tech means for the business.
Rachel Noorda, a researcher and professor of book publishing at Portland State University (PSU), believes publishers are using AI more than they let on. She cited the April 2024 rollout of an internal ChatGPT tool for Penguin Random House employees, which the publisher said in a statement would allow staff to “safely experiment with generative AI during their daily work” in order to “streamline processes, enhance creativity, and provide data insights.”
The existence of programs that can copyedit for clarity, critique craft elements like character development and dialogue, and even restructure entire manuscripts brings into focus the question of how—and whether—human editors and AI can coexist. Directors of publishing programs and editorial educators are some of the leaders looking to answer this question. The positions they take largely depend on what they see on the technology’s rapidly shifting horizon.
Some of the country’s biggest and most prestigious publishing incubators, which often feed into the Big Five, have taken note of the demand for job applicants with AI skills, particularly in corporate publishing. New York University has responded enthusiastically: its Center for Publishing, Writing, and Media (PWM) added a new non-credit certificate in communication and AI to its suite of three master’s programs in 2024, and the website for its Advanced Publishing Institute lists AI as one of the “trends and innovations” it prepares students for.
Andrea Chambers, associate dean at the PWM, says conversations about AI were an “integral aspect of our curriculum.” She tells PW that PWM’s offerings are expanding to include an accelerated advanced certificate in automation, workflows, and the ethics of AI, alongside specialized courses and workshops on AI-assisted storytelling. PWM is focused on “preparing professionals to lead with confidence and ethical awareness in an AI-driven communication landscape,” Chambers explains.
While NYU has been quick to embrace AI in publishing, other educators have adopted more pragmatic, sometimes ambivalent, attitudes. Noorda says all of PSU’s core courses, including Book Editing, have integrated AI skills to some extent, with Digital Skills becoming the “most AI-focused” of its offerings. “Depending on what students end up doing in editorial work, they might be required to use AI tools,” she notes. “And I feel a vast responsibility as a professor to prepare students for that.”
But Noorda isn’t ready to make a call about just how far the industry will take its courtship with automation. It is for this reason, she says, that PSU’s program has also evolved in recent years to emphasize the distinctly human roles that editors play in their work. Good editors, Noorda says, are as adept at “relationship building, empathy, management, and leadership” as they are at manuscript development. Regardless of how AI improves, she adds, the writer-editor relationship is fundamentally one of close human collaboration.
Educational programs at the Los Angeles Review of Books and Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) have taken even stronger stands on the irreplaceability of human editors. This year’s LARB Publishing Workshop, a five-week online intensive, included sessions on “empathetic editing” taught by former LARB editor Jonathan Hahn. Similarly to PSU’s editing philosophy, Hahn’s focuses on one-on-one exchanges with authors, through which editors forge familiarity with their creative vision. Lindsay Wright, director of educational programs at LARB, says that while all the fellows and some of the speakers at this year’s workshop shared concerns about the loss of publishing jobs to AI, there are some jobs that seem “absolutely impossible to replace”—developmental editing being one of them.
Of all publishing professionals, those who face the most challenges due to the rise of AI are, arguably, freelancers. Often paid by the number of pages or words they edit, freelance editors are under “a great deal of pressure” to use AI to work more efficiently and take on more clients, says EFA director of education Asher Rose Fox. “We are in an era of tremendous uncertainty. Freelancers have always struggled for work, but it is particularly hard right now. I have a lot of compassion for people who are in a situation where they go, I’ll take anything.”
In light of this, the EFA has offered members resources to help them “surf the change,” in Fox’s words, including webinars on time-saving tools and, most recently, a presentation by the creators of the AI outlining software Plottr.
The EFA’s official position on AI is neutral, Fox says. On a personal level, though, Fox is far from a proponent of automation in editing, a stance that—like Wright’s and Noorda’s—stems from a belief that human expertise far outreaches the potential of AI. “The AI branding makes people think that they’re talking to something intelligent, when they really are not,” they say. “They’re interacting with a computer program,” which is “really never going to match what you can get from working with an expert in the field.”
Fox, who is based in New York City, says AI’s weakness in stylistic editing is a telling example of how short it falls on tasks that use specific, experiential knowledge. “I can very knowledgeably edit a work that is set in New York City and has people speaking in a specific New York City dialect in a way that a training set would not be able to teach a large language model to do,” they say.
In light of the predicament freelancers find themselves in—pulled in one direction by the market, and another by their ideals—Fox believes the EFA’s main responsibility is to build resilience through knowledge sharing. Freelancers “have a tremendous amount of power in community,” they say.
For now, the demand for human editors remains apparent. Noorda’s latest research paper, which comes out in December, synthesizes interviews with editorial freelancers about how they’re coping as the gig economy heats up. In the course of her research for the paper, titled “Editors as Entrepreneurs: Reframing Occupational Identity in Publishing,” Noorda found that the decision not to use AI is “something some editors are using to set themselves apart,” capitalizing on the belief that a human touch is palpable, and worth protecting. The publishing industry has the power to decide whether to shield this aura, or shatter it.
