Written by Ken Walker
Six months ago, I would have greeted the headline on this blog with a sneering, “Sure. We’re supposed to shake hands with a tool that writes drivel and threatens to take food out of freelance editors’ and writers’ mouths?”
Until June, that characterized the way I felt about artificial intelligence and the way I treated it—as something to be shunned.
I changed my tune while editing a pair of books for a longtime friend who is self-publishing two historical collections of his father’s writings.
As often happens with history, nailing down article titles, publications, and dates can be challenging. When I asked my friend questions during the editing, three times his replies mentioned using ChatGPT.
That got me thinking. A month earlier, Time magazine offered subscribers a free year’s use of its AI tool, You.com. Why not see if it could track down some of the information?
The answer? Clearly, it could. Not only did it help me with the more challenging history book, but it proved more valuable in July, when I took on a different project.
The author had relied on some past research that proved faulty, especially when it came to identifying specific months or timeframes for scholarly or popular media articles.
In one case, You.com—which relies on a series of engines—not only provided the correct article title and date of publication but also gave me the page numbers for the story. It was like finding a gold nugget.
Sometimes, You.com did not provide the information I needed, so I queried the free version of ChatGPT to uncover the elusive facts.
Amid this awakening to AI’s value, a fellow PEN member mentioned running something through Copilot, the pesky Word intruder I had treated until then as a nuisance.
One day, I decided to test it out. I asked it to rewrite an article I had just drafted for a denominational publication. While mostly of little value, one paragraph Copilot revised did sound better, so I used that paragraph in place of mine. The second time I tried it, there was hardly any difference between my version and AI’s, meaning I often skip Copilot. But it’s still nice to know it’s there.
However, You.com is proving so helpful that I have often submitted questions about an important figure’s biography, research they have done, or other minutiae. The resulting answers come back much quicker (and in more detail) than with Google. When my free year is up, I may pay the $15 a month to retain its services.
When it comes to customer (dis)service and other features, I still dislike AI intensely. I have learned its research results are sometimes inaccurate. And any AI-generated articles, stories, or book drafts I have read could be described in one word—abysmal. Good editors have nothing to fear from it.
Still, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. AI can be a useful tool in the right hands.
Ken Walker is a freelance writer and book editor with more than 4,700 article bylines to his credit. He has coauthored, edited, or contributed to more than 100 books. Three of his substantive editing projects have been released in 2025, and two more are to be published soon.
“AI can be a useful tool …” THAT is the key!
Amen to this! I don’t know about other countries, but certainly here in the United States, our culture suffers greatly from “shiny object syndrome.” Invariably, something new comes along, and we obsess over, using it for everything, whether or not appropriate. We take a hammer and use it as a screwdriver, and when that doesn’t work well, either we complain or we corrupt the hammer into a form that sort-of resembles a screwdriver. The results are, as you say, “abysmal.”
It’s a TOOL, folks, just as our automobiles, dishwashers, and chain saws are tools.
I suppose that people like you, Ken, will and must continue to beat the drum of “appropriate use” regarding AI. It will take a long time before people’s ears open to the message, as they dash down the next rabbit hole of obsession.