How and Why I Use AI as a Freelance Editor, Proofreader, and Copywriter

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere at the moment. And whether we like it or not, it’s going to stay everywhere.
I admit I’m a relative latecomer to it and was vaguely worried that it was going to steal my livelihood — who’s going to pay me to write something for them when ChatGPT can do it for free at the click of a button?

But then I had the good fortune of being asked to edit Andrew Reid’s excellent book, The ChatGPT Guide for Business, and its non-sensational, step-by-step approach helped me to realise that AI could help my work, rather than hinder it.

However, as there are currently a lot of worrying headlines about what AI might be capable of (from taking jobs to destroying humanity), I thought it wise to write this brief explainer so you know that when you employ me, you’re working with me and my skills; you’re not paying me to get a computer to do it all.

So yes, I have decided to adopt AI, specifically ChatGPT, into my work. However, I emphatically do not use it to generate content that I am being paid to write. Nor have I used it to generate any content for this website beyond two random paragraphs for me to demonstrate what editing and proofreading are and a suggestion for a section title. I have then thought about and amended everything I have asked it to generate.

When I do use ChatGPT for a project, I essentially employ it as a kind of mega-Google, asking it questions about, say, US/UK grammar conventions or whether a certain term is hyphenated or capitalised in a specific context. I may also use it as part of my SEO research or ask it for guidance on something like writing a meta tag. For these kinds of tasks, I think AI makes my work stronger and more accurate.

​I must stress, however, that I do not use ChatGPT as a wholesale spelling-and-grammar-checking tool (its grammar isn’t perfect, I have to say!), and under no circumstances would I ever paste any portion of my clients’ work into it. When you work with me, anything you have written or you want me to write with you is treated sensitively and confidentially unless specified otherwise.