A.I. and Writing

Editing with Gemini

I have been using Gemini for about two months to help edit my articles. It has been working pretty well until my most recent one. In the final editing cycle, Gemini changed some of the language so it no longer reflected my style of writing. The substance of the article is mine; I wrote it. But there are enough stylistic changes to no longer read as I write. I found that disappointing and offensive. Some explanation of why I started using Gemini may be in order.

Writing an article is quite a production for a blind guy typing. I am most comfortable typing but am learning to dictate. I type very fast, but sometimes my thinking gets ahead of my typing, and strange things happen. This can be made worse by my fingers straying to the wrong keys, which they do with some frequency. Dictating should be an improvement, but it turns out Siri has a limited vocabulary of words she knows how to spell, and sometimes doesn’t listen to what I am saying. Moreover, I have to speak slowly, and that disturbs the process of creative thinking. Nevertheless, a rough draft eventually takes form.

I listen to the first draft and try to fix the most egregious errors. As any writer will tell you, this sometimes means cutting out entire sections, rearranging paragraphs, or filling in much-needed transitions between main points. The next step has been for my patient and much-harassed wife to review and edit for me. I make final changes after I have listened to what she has done, and she edits it again before publication… we hope. It’s not like she is sitting around waiting to edit my drafts. She is a professional artist with her own career and demands on her time.

So, a little over two months ago, I began using Gemini to do the initial editing and have been very happy with it until my recent article on messaging to win elections. It is quite a bit longer than most Country Parson articles and has more complicated arguments. I ran it through Gemini and then had my wife read it. She had some very good observations, made a few changes, and suggested I make more. I did and ran it through Gemini again. It still needed some tweaking. When I had finished, I ran it through Gemini a third time and published. It was a mistake.

When I listened to the published piece, I was shocked to hear something I wrote in a style that was not my own. I will keep using Gemini but be much more careful with it in the future. Even this short piece has been run through Gemini.”

Here is what Gemini did for this one:

Here’s a breakdown of the changes:

• Spelling: Corrected “aproductionm” to “production,” “follwoing” to “following,” “a. Eye.” to “AI,” and other typos.
• Punctuation: Added commas, semicolons, and other punctuation for clarity.
• Grammar: Corrected subject-verb agreement and pronoun usage.
• Clarity and Flow: Rephrased some sentences for better readability and flow. Removed redundancies.