Trying Out “AI Proofreading” in Our Editing Process

I’ve yet to see any “intelligence” in so-called artificial intelligence (AI) tools, but I’ve tried out as many as I can to see if they can be useful in proofreading. For the most part, the tools do poorly. The problem is that they are focused on rewriting (or even writing from scratch) based on tone or prompts. Nothing could be less useful when trying to edit an already polished manuscript. When Apple announced their suite of writing tools (part of “Apple Intelligence”), I installed the beta version of their latest OS update to try them out.

For the most part, I’ve been pleased. Apple’s “proofread” option takes a light hand to changes in the text and catches a lot of basic errors. For example, it almost always catches things like this:

His voice quivered with fear to His voice quavered with fear.

“Yes, I heard you.” she said to “Yes, I heard you,” she said.

He bought bread, apples and pears to He bought bread, apples, and pears.

There’s several pieces missing to There are several pieces missing.

It’s also really good at catching verb tenses, like changing past tense to past perfect.

There are a variety of things it struggles with, like changing lower-case “google” (a verb) to “goggle.” And it wants to clean up grammar in dialogue, which is annoying but understandable. (Perhaps in a future version, I can instruct it to ignore grammar in quotation marks… though this seems like it could introduce additional problems.)

Aside from what it corrects and doesn’t correct, the key to using this in our editing workflow is making sure we can see and approve every change that it makes. Apple has provided no easy way to do this, so here’s the way I’ve come up with. For the purposes of people finding this blog post in searches, I probably should have titled it “How to use Apple AI proofreading with Track Changes in Microsoft Word,” because that’s what we’re doing.

1. Duplicate the file to edit, and open that copy.

2. Make sure the file is set to “editing” rather than “reviewing.” (In previous versions of Word, this instruction is “Make sure Track Changes is off.”)

3. Chapter by chapter, use “Proofread” in the Writing Tools menu.

4. When encountering an error, select a smaller amount of text. There are a variety of weird spots where the tool simply won’t work and won’t tell you why. For example, I found it couldn’t handle this string: “Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry” in a Word document, though trying it now it works just fine, putting commas between each “sorry.”

5. Save the document once it has all been AI-proofread.

6. Open the original version and set it to “reviewing” (in other words, turn Track Changes on).

7. Use the “Compare” option (in the Review tab), with the original version as the one with no edits and the revised version as the one that’s been proofread.

8. In “Comparison Settings,” I have checked “Case changes” and “Fields” and nothing else. I have it set to show changes at the character level and to show the changes in the original document. I have it label changes with my name. (Alternatively—and maybe we should start doing this—you could label it as “AI.”) And then hit “OK.”

The result is track changes enabled in the original document, just as if it’s been edited by a person. At this point, our human editing begins, because there are changes that AI didn’t catch and also changes it made that are incorrect. But because it has done a good job at catching some fiddly little things like commas, it allows the human editor to work faster and give more attention to bigger questions. And this is exactly what I am looking for!

All these tools are likely to get better over time, and I hope tools from other companies will offer proofreading specific tools (rather than “rewrite” tools) soon. For the time being, I’m happy enough with the performance of Apple’s tools that I will keep doing the slightly tedious steps above prior to handing over a manuscript to a human editor.

Have you tried out any AI tools for editing? How’s your experience been? Share your thoughts in the comments!