Is RightMyWork against using AI to write?

Not at all. What we care about is disciplined use. The line that matters is authorship: whether the person whose name is on the work is still the one shaping it, choosing what stays, and standing behind it. Used with craft and a sense of responsibility, AI is a perfectly good tool. The worry is a manuscript churned out at scale with nobody really behind it.

Why focus on writers rather than editors?

Because publishing works like a watershed. Everything runs downhill, from the writer at the summit to the reader in the valley. Once the source is contaminated, no amount of careful work further down can fully clean it up. So the use of AI that carries the most weight sits right at the top, with writers, which happens to be where the industry is looking least.

Does the piece argue editors are doing something wrong?

Its sharper point is about posture. Publicly swearing off AI while quietly relying on it downstream tends to read as protectiveness about price rather than principle. The constructive path for editors is an economic one: use AI to do more good work at a lower cost, and bring quality editing within reach of more writers.

What does this have to do with RightMyWork?

RightMyWork is built around the third idea in the piece: one accountable workflow where a draft is edited with AI working in plain sight, every change tracked, and you deciding what to accept. The editor applies what it can apply with confidence, flags what it cannot, and leaves the judgement calls to you.

The Bewildered Publishing Industry: AI and the Publishing Chain

Imagine a mountain. Water collects at the peak and runs downhill through every tier below, feeding each stream in turn before it reaches the valley floor. Publishing is built much the same way. Writers sit at the summit, and everything they produce, every sentence, every argument, every flicker of voice, flows down into the hands of the editors, the proofreaders, the formatters, and the publishers before it ever lands with a reader.

AI has settled into every level of this watershed. Editors lean on it for style checking. Proofreaders use it to catch errors at scale. Publishers run it across metadata, rights analytics, and market forecasting. There is nothing remarkable in any of that; tools have always found their way into the workflow. What counts is where the use carries the most weight, and that is right at the top of the mountain, with the writers. Which is exactly where the industry’s anxiety is at once completely understandable and badly aimed.

If AI quietly writes the manuscript, every conscientious editor downstream is shouting in a forest, one they are slowly losing the right to stand in.

Editorial commentary

The logic is simple hydrology. When the source water is contaminated, it hardly matters how good the filters are further down. You can hand a manuscript to the most principled copy editor in the business, someone who agonises over every comma, every citation, every passive construction, and it changes nothing fundamental if the raw text was largely produced by a language model with no real authorial intent behind it. The contamination travels with the current.

Part II

Where the usual responses go wrong

The industry’s first instincts on AI-generated writing have tended to be performative, a little naive about how the chain actually works, or quietly hypocritical. Sometimes all three at once.

What will not work

Banning writers from publishing if they have used AI. It is unenforceable, blunt, and confused about what authorship even means in a tool-assisted era.

Editors and proofreaders performing their ethics in public. When the source upstream is polluted, the downstream display does little, and it sits awkwardly beside their own quiet tool use.

Publishers signalling that they shut AI out, while running it across rights, discoverability, metadata, and marketing. The moral authority simply is not there.

What can actually work

Helping writers use AI with craft, intent, and a clear sense of responsibility for whatever carries their name.

Editors and proofreaders using AI to take on more work at a lower cost, widening access to good editing instead of guarding a premium rate.

Publishers building shared, accountable platforms where writers, editors, and formatters work in one visible flow, with AI as plumbing rather than camouflage.

There is a fair amount of this going around the editorial middle of the industry: a quiet competition to show, in public, that one’s hands are the cleanest in a dirty room. It misreads the problem. How a copy editor uses a tool matters far less than what lands on that editor’s desk to begin with. When a manuscript has been generated at industrial scale with little authorial engagement, no amount of careful proofreading can put back a human voice that was never really there.

There is some awkwardness in it, too. Most working editors already reach for AI-assisted grammar tools, style checkers, and increasingly structural analysis software. Condemning the same technology upstream while leaning on it downstream tends to read as protectiveness about price rather than principle.

Publishers face their own version of this. A house that uses AI to triage its slush pile, tune its catalogue metadata, and model its rights licensing has little standing to bar AI from the writing process on ethical grounds. What it does have is the standing, and the means, to lead the structural reform the industry actually needs.

Part III

Three things that would actually help

Help writers use AI with craft and accountability

The aim is disciplined use. Picture a writer who turns to a language model to get past a structural block, to look at an argument from a fresh angle, or to pressure-test their own prose, and who then rewrites the result in their own voice and on their own judgement. That writer has cheated no one; they have used a tool well. What counts is whether they are still the author, the person who shapes the work, decides what stays, and stands behind it. The industry can teach that, model it, and hold it up as the standard, which will carry it far further than any attempt to police or ban it.

Rethink editing economics around volume

The biggest opportunity for editors and proofreaders is an economic one. AI lets a skilled editor get through a great deal more work in the same hours. The easy temptation is to guard the hourly rate and pocket the gain. The better move is to hand that efficiency back to authors as lower prices, take on more clients, and bring good editing within reach of writers who could never have afforded it. The premium pricing that once fenced quality off is already eroding. The editors who do well from here will be the ones who use AI to serve more people without letting the work slip, building practices that scale rather than rate cards that gatekeep.

Build one accountable, shared workflow

This is the structural fix the industry keeps circling without building. Publishers hold the capital, the relationships, and the reason to create a place where every tier of the watershed is visible, connected, and answerable to the next. Picture a manuscript moving through developmental editing, copy editing, and proofreading inside a single flow, with AI as the plumbing that joins it up, every contributor's work on the record, and the author keeping sight of all of it and consenting at each step. A setup like that sharpens the human role rather than shrinking it, and it holds every tier to account, not only against its own standards but against the whole chain. That is a practical answer to the problem of a poisoned source, and for now it is the only one we have.

Whatever this moment is, it reads less as an AI crisis than an accountability one, and AI has simply made it impossible to keep ignoring. The water runs downhill, the way it always has. The only question worth asking is what kind of water we choose to send from the top.

The Bewildered Publishing Industry