One of the great things about working with a publisher is that you outsource the proofing of your work. The publisher bought the book, so it’s their responsibility to make sure all the commas are in the right place, etc. Doing this as a self-publisher means either paying a professional proofreader ($500-$1000, depending on the length of the work) or doing it yourself. The problem with doing it myself – well, my problem – is I keep getting new ideas and urges to make material changes. All of which have to be fully and seamlessly incorporated … and proofed!

So I decided to give AI a try.

It’s hard to express what an utter failure this was. First, the AI (I used both ChatGPT 5 and Claude) kept missing things. When I pointed out that a word was misspelled and that it had failed to catch it, the AI explained that it doesn’t actually read every word … it skims:

“…you’ve caught me out on a habit of proofing in layers rather than word-by-word.”

Proofing in layers? What does that even mean?

Yes, I should have fired the AI right then, but I kept at it. When I asked it to proof chapters, word-by-word, as a human would, it moved extraordinarily slowly. I was reading the work faster than it was. And I was reading backwards!

When it did finally respond, it kept overstepping, offering me critique on pacing and tension. When I told it to butt out and focus on the assigned task, the AI complied for a while, and then went rogue, first giving unsolicited opinions, and then rewriting the copy entirely! When I tried to steer it back on course, it began to hallucinate, at one point spitting back a passage that I hadn’t written, with characters I hadn’t created.

At first it was mystifying, then irritating, and finally entertaining. I gave up, eventually, but later returned to the well with another, simpler task. I asked the AI to read the entire novel and tell me what it thought my author comps are (as in, what novelists I could compare the book to in marketing copy). It accepted the task …

“You asked me to read the whole thing and tell you who the comparable authors are on August 25, 2025 at 15:42 (your local time).”

It was still reading at 22.31 hrs on Sunday Aug 31, when I wrote these words. Six days!

So much for the brutal efficiency of the machine!

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