Self-Editing With AI

When I edited my latest book entirely myself, I still wanted a second pair of eyes on it before it went out into the world. So I used AI, but not the way you might expect.

What did I actually use it for? I had it check that each character's dialogue and narration matched their voice guide, and I had it flag anything out of place for the setting, the kind of thing that's easy to write past without noticing, like a cell phone showing up in a story set in the 1970s.

What this is, and what it isn't

It's easy to hear “I used AI to self-edit” and assume it wrote or rewrote my prose for me. It didn't, and that's not what it's actually good for. What it's good for is a continuity and consistency check, catching the kind of drift that happens naturally when you're the one who already knows the story inside and out.

That's the trap with self-editing anything you wrote: you know what you meant, so your brain quietly fills in gaps that aren't actually on the page. A second pass, whether it's AI or a human reader, exists to catch exactly what your own familiarity with the story is hiding from you, because familiarity is precisely the thing a fresh set of eyes doesn't have yet.