The Old editor glares at AI

 A while back I shared a post, then deleted it after I was persuaded that the image in it had been generated by AI. I do not trust AI and do not consciously use it, for the following reasons. And because I am posting this online, I am confident that some generous soul will point out how misinformed I am. 

AI depends on accumulating a vast store of texts from which to generate material. Some of that text is copyrighted, and my understanding is that the copyright holders are neither cited nor compensated. 

The ability to generate new texts from this store makes both plagiarism and fabrication easy, leaving the reader with the task of identifying what can be trusted. We've seen accounts of teachers who cannot vouch for the authenticity of the work their students submit, as well as of legal filings that include bogus citations. (In a proper society, this phenomenon would mean more work for editors to ferret out the genuine from the dross, but few care enough about accuracy to engage editors.) 

AI requires enormous quantities of electricity for its servers, which leads to increases in cost for ordinary consumers and strain on the power grid. It also requires huge quantities of water to cool those servers, which makes it environmentally questionable.

I am beginning to see articles questioning the sustainability of the project: millions invested in  technology that is made obsolete by further technical advances before the initial investment is recouped. This could, these articles warn, lead to a financial collapse comparable to the housing bubble and subprime mortgage collapse of 2008. 

So, yes, I am not a cheerleader. 

 

To the students

 Fleming County High School in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, from which I graduated in 1969, has announced on Facebook that it is looking for guest speakers "passionate about their careers" who would be willing to "invest in students' futures for the 2025-2026 school year during school hours." One of the categories for speakers is journalism. 

Well, I am elderly, in Baltimore, and disinclined to drive there to talk for twenty minutes or so, but Fleming County did prepare me for a career of more than forty-five years in journalism, and I know a few things from which those students might benefit. 

I am writing this for the chance that a high school student might look at it. If you are a jaded sophisticate, you might want to read somewhere else. 

The first thing to be passionate about is reading. I was starved for books in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the library was established and when the school libraries were skimpy. I read comic books. I read history, biography, science fiction, everything I could get my hands on. And I kept on reading. Wide reading is the foundation of work in writing, how you know what works and what doesn't; and for an editor it is not possible to know too much about many subjects. 

Even before that wide reading, I picked up standard English grammar quickly in class. Yes, I was a teacher's pet and obnoxiously officious, but if you want a career that involves writing, you have to know and use the standard English dialect. Savor and speak in all the Englishes you encounter and like--there is nothing wrong with that. But mastering standard English grammar and usage is your entry point to the profession. 

When I was a junior in high school, Lowell Denton, the publisher of the Flemingsburg Gazette, invited me to work there in the summers. His wife, Jean, liked to take the summer off, and so I worked as reporter, columnist, and copy editor for six summers in high school and college. This was invaluable experience. Writing and editing are a craft; you learn them by doing them. If someone gives you a chance to learn it as you go along and make your mistakes early, do not pass it up. 

In college and graduate school I majored in English. Once again, the reading: different authors at different times in different genres, seeing how they stretched the language, seeing how they put things together in different structures, talking about books and authors with knowledgeable friends. 

Abandoning a misguided plan to become a Ph.D. in English literature, I by chance landed a job on the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer and there through working with helpful and knowledgeable colleagues, I learned to be a copy editor. It's a craft that you learn by doing, remember? That in turn led to a thirty-four-year career at The Baltimore Sun during which I oversaw the copy desk and a retirement gig as an editor for The Baltimore Banner. 

So thanks to Frances Dorsey in the fourth grade and Lynda McKee in high school, to Lowell and Jean Denton, and to colleagues in Cincinnati and Baltimore and nationally who saw some prospect of ability in me, I have had the satisfaction of doing the work I was meant to do. I hope that you will discover as fortunate an outcome. 

What we have lost

The tone in newspapers, when I started out as a copy editor forty years ago, was that the copy desk was a place where reporters fetched  up after their legs or livers gave out, or a domain of quibblers obsessed with minuscule details--comma jockeys. 

Well, I do like to see a verb agree with its subject, and I can punctuate with the precision of a marksman. But the key thing, the fundamental thing about the traditional copy desk, is that it was set apart. It was not connected with the desks that generated stories, and it played no part in their processes. Instead, it was independent, and its members looked fresh at each story, much like a reader. 

Reporters work with their editors on stories, on which they come to an understanding of what should be in them and how the material should be treated. The back-and-forth between editors and reporters carries an inherent hazard of developing groupthink. The copy editor, traditionally understood, has not been a part of groupthink and can raise questions of importance about the focus, tone, and structure of the story. 

That gives, as former Baltimore Sun publisher Mike Waller once said, the opportunity to raise the most important question that a copy editor can ever articulate: Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really sure?"

On one occasion, a story came to the Sun's copy desk from a department head in which our copy editors identified not only an incoherent structure but a set of passages that could have constituted outright libel, and we defused it, to the publisher's subsequent gratitude. (I used a version of this story, with substitutions for all proper nouns, for years in my editing class at Loyola Maryland, and it never failed to leave the students agog. "You were going to publish this?) 

But as the newspaper business declined, the sharp-pencil people determined that copy editors were an expensive frill. The Sun's last copy editor departed in 2019, and some years ago The New York Times, once famed for its copy editing, disbanded its copy desks and assigned survivors to the respective originating desks, where they can resist groupthink, or perhaps not. 

We once had a model, and it served the reader well.