The AI surcharge: Why you should mark up editing jobs of AI-generated text by 50%.

I’m spoiled. As an editor, I prefer to help humans write things that communicate ideas to other humans. That’s exciting and fun, and at least as important, improves the lot of both the writer and the reader. It’s work, sure, but it’s work that matters. I’m good at it, and I love it.

Take away the writer, and the work becomes excruciatingly tedious. It’s boring, and the results are tepid — you can’t create interesting ideas from idea-free slop.

I’ve mentioned from time to time that I add a 50% surcharge to edit AI-generated content. Call it the AI surcharge, or the slop fee. It’s an idea that has attracted a lot of attention. Now I’d like to make it a standard part of all editing contracts.

Why AI-generated material creates problems for editors

The editor’s job is to make a document do its job better. This means figuring out what the writer was trying to do, and then evaluating what in what ways they failed or could do better.

There are a limitless number of possible ways to fail, from lack of clarity to weak evidence to poor storytelling. You can also fail at the language level with text that’s too long, poorly organized, passive, pedantic, meandering, or just doesn’t make sense (often generating the highly articulate editor comment “Huh?”) I wrote a whole book about writing well, and there are lots of other books, too. But any editor will tell you that each new document reveals a new way in which writers can fail to accomplish their goals.

But one thing always used to be true. The writer was trying to accomplish a goal. The objective of editing text isn’t just to find and fix the flaws, it is to figure out why the writer failed or could have done better. It’s an exercise in applied psychology. Writers that are too arrogant insult the reader. Writers that are poorly organized repeat themselves. Writers that are unsure pile up words where evidence would be better.

So the editing process was in part an exercise in figuring out what the writer was trying to do and why they couldn’t do it as well as they needed to. This meant that with the right edits you could improve the writer as well as the text, so the writer would be better next time.

With AI-generated text, there is no writer. You can’t psychoanalyze an algorithm. You’re stuck just reading the text and figuring out what’s wrong with it.

Editing AI-generated text is tedious

AI-generated text tends to be even and boring. How can you fix that? As an editor, you don’t have tools that make text less boring — that’s the writer’s job. AI-generated text is likely to lull the editor to sleep.

As an editor, you can closely read 50 pages in a row and understand what the writer was trying to do, and what’s failing. But it’s really, really difficult to read 50 pages in a row of bland, sleep-inducing text. You have to go slowly and take more breaks, and you may become depressed or suicidal.

AI-generated text can be repetitive. But the repetition isn’t like what writers create. It’s scattered throughout. It’s hard to detect, because editors don’t always remember that what they read on page 6 is really close to what they are now reading on page 206.

AI generates hallucinated evidence. That means checking each reference to see if it exists, and if so, does it actually say what AI implies that it says. That’s time-consuming and boring.

All of that is tedious work. Greatness isn’t even possible. You’re just trying to make things less awful. Which isn’t very motivating.

Why charge more?

Some of my clients expect me to clean up the mess they made by using AI to write things. I’ll do that, if the writing is about something worth expounding on. But it’s going to be more work, simply because it’s less motivating.

There are two reasons I created the AI surcharge:

1. The work is harder to concentrate on and less rewarding.
2. I want to discourage writers from believing that outsourcing writing to AI is a good and productive idea.

Do you agree with the idea of a 50% AI surcharge?

If so, add your name in a comment on this post.