Snoozefest! What Happens When AI Critiques AI

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Weekly Tips for Writing & Publishing Your Bestselling Book

The New York Times published a quiz that has been making the rounds in writing circles, and if you haven't taken it yet, I'm going to ask you to pause and do so before you read another word. 86,000 people compared pairs of writing passages — one written by a human, one by an AI — spanning genres, and answered the question: which do you prefer?

54 percent of readers chose the AI.

I took the quiz myself, sitting at my desk here in Honolulu with my morning coffee going cold beside me as my tummy grew increasingly unsettled. Why did people prefer the AI writing? They analyzed their reasons in the comment section: because it had no rough edges, unexpected word choices that make you stop, no twists of syntax. Just smooth, coherent and pleasurable passages that, for more than half of readers, felt better.

Which brings me to something I've been watching happen with my own clients, and that I find equally alarming.

Joanne has been writing her book with the help of AI, and recently worked with one of our human team members to develop the manuscript further. It was sounding pretty great, and we here at YBB felt it was close to ready for publication.

Then Joanne fed her draft to an AI tool for critique. The AI came back with a recommendation to pivot her entire topic. Its reasoning was that some of the personal client stories she'd included might upset people. But Joanne and her editor, of course, had spent considerable time and care disguising every client's identity — changing names, altering locations, adjusting identifying physical details — precisely so that these stories could be told safely and ethically. The AI flagged a problem that didn't exist, and in doing so nearly convinced Joanne to abandon the essence of her book.

Then there’s Mark, a lawyer whose manuscript we had worked very hard to develop together. He ran his nearly final draft through an AI critique tool, and the feedback came back saying there were “too many stories.”

I will confess that when he told me this, I had to resist the urge to jump up and down screaming “WT ACTUAL F” in frustration. Who, in the entire history of publishing, has ever heard of too many stories? The AI went further, suggesting that the personal narratives actually undermined Mark's credibility as a legal expert. This is precisely backwards. If a reader wants a lawyer's answer to their legal problems, they will type their question into ChatGPT and get an answer in 30 seconds. What they pick up an actual book for is something else entirely. They want to understand Mark’s hard-won wisdom, to follow the arc of his thinking, and to have legal situations come alive through the stories. Stories are the only reason a reader would choose to spend six hours with a lawyer’s book rather than a search engine!

A third client, Serena, came to me after having written her entire manuscript in her own distinctive voice. Again, we got it to a place where I felt confident that it was polished and ready to publish. Then, feeling uncertain about it, she ran the whole thing through AI to be rewritten and “improved.” What came back was technically smoother, but far less interesting. Gone were the idiosyncrasies that made her voice recognizable. All of it had been averaged out into something that could have been written by anyone, which is to say, by no one in particular.

This is the paradox buried inside that New York Times quiz. The very qualities that led readers to prefer AI over Cormac McCarthy and Elizabeth Bishop — the polish, the smoothness, the absence of rough edges — are precisely the qualities that make AI a dangerous editor of your manuscript. When AI evaluates your writing, it is pattern-matching against an enormous archive of everything that has come before. So, by design it filters out whatever seems unusual, too personal, or unexpected… What makes your book yours.

IMHO, you should use AI to brainstorm, generate a rough table of contents, push through a stuck first draft, add a conclusion. But when it comes time to evaluate the soul of your manuscript, bring a human into the process.

Hit reply and tell me: Have you used AI to critique your writing? What did it tell you to change?

Aloha, MeiMei

 

TIP OF THE WEEK:

Ask AI the Opposite Question

If you use AI as part of your writing process, try flipping the standard critique prompt.

Rather than asking what to improve or cut, ask it: “What in this passage sounds most distinctly human? What detail here could only have come from lived experience?”

You may be surprised by what it identifies. Perhaps it will find exactly the sentences worth protecting.

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Quote of the Week

The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before.

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe