Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have made a significant contribution to the editing of manuscripts, offering potential benefits such as convenience, speed, and a degree of accuracy. They are commonly used to help detect and correct issues such as grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style.
However, these tools have their limitations and they certainly don't replace a human editor. Here are some AI-based tools that are often used for English editing:
Grammarly: It offers grammar checking, spell checking, and plagiarism detection. It can help detect numerous English errors, suggest correct options, and also provide short explanations for the proposed corrections.
Hemingway Editor: This tool is used to improve readability. It identifies complex sentences, passive voice, adverbs, and words or phrases that have simpler alternatives.
ProWritingAid: It functions as a style editor and grammar checker, focusing more on improving the style and tone of the writing.
Ginger: This tool checks and corrects grammatical mistakes, punctuation, and sentence structure. It also has a rephrasing feature.
The limitations of these AI tools revolve around their inability to fully understand context, the subtleties of human language, creativity, and the target audience's cultural and social background. Here are some points to consider:
Contextual Understanding: AI tools can often correct simple, discrete errors like grammar and spelling. However, they sometimes struggle with understanding the context of a sentence or a paragraph. They may not recognize whether a sentence that grammatically seems incorrect is, in fact, a creative choice or a regional usage.
Stylistic and Creative Elements: The human brain can appreciate and create stylistic and creative elements in writing, such as metaphors, idioms, and puns, which AI tools may fail to recognize or suggest.
Tone and Audience Understanding: Human editors are more capable of understanding and crafting writing suitable for a particular audience, especially when cultural nuances and localized expressions are involved. An AI tool may not be able to effectively suggest changes for a piece of writing targeting a specific demographic.
Intuition and Experience: Editors bring years of experience and intuition to their work. They can make informed decisions based on what they've learned from similar situations in the past. In contrast, AI can only make decisions based on pre-programmed rules or patterns it has learned from its training data.
In summary, while AI tools can serve as excellent aids in the editing process, they aren't perfect and can't fully replace human understanding and creativity. They should be used as complementary tools in the editing process, while the final review should ideally be done by a human editor to ensure the highest quality output.
AI can be convenient in editing the manuscript but it has some constraints. A human editor can play a substantial role in editing taking the help of AI when needed.