The future of editing jobs in the age of AI, with Samantha Enslen
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Inyan Fogarty. And for the next few weeks, while we're taking a season break, we're going to release some of our best of the best bonus episodes that people who support the show through Grammarpalooza got during this last interview season. This week, you're going to get behind the scenes conversations with Samantha and

who owns a writing, editing, and design agency, Dragonfly Editorial. And we're going to talk about how she thinks AI is going to affect jobs for writers and editors and how it will affect her agency. We

We do these kind of extras every time I do an interview, so almost every week. Thank you to the current Grammarpalooza subscribers for supporting this show. We appreciate it so much, and it makes these bonuses possible. If you want to help and support the show, you can sign up on the show page at Apple Podcasts right there on the listing, or separately to get everything by text message at

You can go to quickanddirtytips.com slash bonus to learn more. And links to both of those are in the show notes. Sam, thanks so much for being here. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Yeah. So in the main segment, we talked about how you are and aren't using AI and sort of what we think are its pros and cons. You know, but as someone who owns an agency that employs writers, editors, and designers, I

I'm so curious to hear more about what you think its effect is going to be on the job market for those kind of people. Like, have you been losing clients? Are you worried about losing clients? Like, I have seen people talking about losing clients. I've seen writers and editors talk about not being able to get work. And so I'm really concerned about it. I feel like you probably have more insider, you know, insight into that than I do. Yeah.

If you don't want to talk about it, that's totally fine. It's your, you know, your internal business stuff. No, I do want to talk about it. And I think it's a fantastic question. And I think we've seen some of both. I think I'll be honest with you. We have had a couple projects come in that were, for example, very simple projects.

transcription projects where every now and then somebody will have an interview like this, or there'll be a speech and they'll ask us to listen to the tapes and transcribe the interviews. And we've gone back to them and said, yes, we can do this. You could also use an AI tool to just transcribe that for you. And then you can look at it afterwards and make sure it's correct. And they've said,

Oh, good idea. Yeah, we'll do that ourselves. But, you know, I feel like that's our responsibility as a trusted advisor to our customers anyway. You know, I'm not if a tool does come about that can actually do something more quickly and easily than we can at the same level of efficiency and effectiveness, then, you

It would be remiss on my part not to recommend that to our clients. Or if not recommended, at least we don't want to try to hide it from them. There was another example that we had where a customer had asked us to look at several documents and just write quick summaries of them, almost like an executive summary. And I think, again, we may have mentioned, do you mind if we use an AI tool to help us with this?

And then as soon as we said that, they were like, oh, never mind. We'll do that ourselves. Yeah. But, you know, that's so be it. I'm not trying to trick our customers into giving us work or, you know, keeping work with us that truly now they can do just as well on their own. Now, let me talk about the other side of that.

We have had customers who have, okay, we have one customer who we write blog entries for or articles and they're in the finance sector. So again, these tend to be fairly complex topics. And they came to us and said, okay, we had an AI write some of these for us. Can you just review them?

And, you know, make them make sure they're okay and make sure they're in our voice and, you know, sound like all the rest of our collateral and make sense and, you know, all those good things. So we did review those and the amount of work that we had to do to revise the AI written blogs, what it was more onerous and took more time than if we had just edited.

written them ourselves. Yeah, I've heard that from multiple people. Yeah. And gone with our standard process of interviewing a subject matter expert, doing some independent research on our own, writing the content in what we knew to be their brand voice. You know, so that's a case where the customer tried to whatever you want to say, do it on the cheap, do it efficiently, do it with AI. And it kind of backfired because they wound up taking more time for us to fix the

what AI made than if we had just done it ourselves. So what my hope is that things like that are going to balance out. You know, what I have told our staff is if there's ways that we can start doing editing projects more efficiently, for example. For example, one of the, I guess, kind of low-hanging fruit you could say in editing projects is, you

editing reference lists or bibliographies, things that are at the end of a research article that's like author last name, author first name, publication, article name, you know, volume, number. And this has to be italics and this has to be in quotation marks. And this has to be in italics and there's a colon goes here and a period goes here. It's extremely tedious work.

work, especially because different journals have different styles. The APA, the American Psychological Association might want you to italicize these words, whereas AMA, American Medical Association wants you to italicize these different words. And one of them wants you to put the volume number in parentheses. And one of them wants you to have a colon after it.

So some of the AIs, for example, have gotten, they're actually good enough right now where you could give them, plop a reference list in and say, please edit this according to AMA style.

or Chicago style, or AP style, or what have you. And it's going to get it 90 or 95% of the way correct. Now, again, we still want to have a human editor go behind and check. And it will do some things sometimes weird, like if you had a citation that didn't have

city or state, it will make up a city and state for the publication, or it will like make up the name of a missing author. So you do have to be careful and check behind. But, you know, if it can do a lot of that, I think for any copy editor, any editor, you

that's still going to be kind of boring and tedious work editing a reference list. So if we have a report and we can spend the most, our valuable time editing

Editing the substance of the report and refining the meaning and logic and making sure it really conveys what the customer wants to convey and spend less of our time on tediously editing a bibliography. That's good for us and that's good for the customer.

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This is what I worry about, though. Like when I was first out of college, I worked for a consulting company and we were we were paid by the hour. And so if AI is making you 20 percent more efficient and taking away that tedious work is still somebody's job. And so do you think or hope or plan that, you know, OK, we'll find 20 percent more

meaningful client work to fill in those hours? Or are you thinking, you know, when you think about your own business, are you thinking, well, okay, we might have to budget for 10 or 20% less work because we're being so much more efficient? Again, the honest answer is I don't know. Yes, it could be that two years from now or five years from now, our agency is 20% smaller because that's what, how work has changed. And, you know, and that's what the market will bear. What I am

gambling on slash hoping is that it's the opposite. We will be freed up from some of the more mundane tasks. So our staff has more time to focus on higher value things, writing, substantive editing, project management, proposal management, strategizing, creating a

Not just sitting and writing a blog, but what's the whole content strategy, marketing and communication strategy that the company has for the whole year? What are all the topics that should be written about? Right.

It will allow us to get involved at that higher level, if you will, work. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things, I hope so too, I've heard people talk about AI in coding and, you know, we didn't talk about that, but it's always also useful in, you know, just computer programming, coding and coding.

the person that I listened to believes that, you know, we're going to make fewer things, you know, that if coding becomes 50% more efficient, let's say we're going to have 50% more products to choose from. We're going to have 50% more cool apps and games and, and things like that. So, you know, I,

I do hope that's the case for editing and writing too. But I think that's what I meant when I said before that it's kind of unavoidable because as a business owner, you can't just say, well, we aren't going to use spellcheck essentially. We're going to spend our time looking words up in the dictionary because that's human labor. I mean, when these tools are available, maybe not today, but eventually your clients are going to expect that you'll be as efficient as you can possibly be. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, if we look back on the history of labor saving devices, whether it's a dishwasher, a washing machine, a vacuum cleaner, having a personal computer, it's not like, you know, once we invented PCs and everybody could do work on a computer, we collectively decided, okay,

Now we really only need a 15-hour work week for everybody because we can do the same amount of work. Let's just everybody take a break. Remember the concept of the paperless office? Yeah, that's not happening. I still have papers all over the floor. So yeah, that's...

I think that AI right now, it's like, ooh, we can do things faster, but that just means that it's going to allow us to do more. I'm not sure we have a paradigm where, oh, let's everybody relax and take it easy in our society right now. Right.

Well, let's actually imagine we're going to relax because I also want to hear your book recommendations. So unless you're recommending post-apocalyptic fiction, hopefully your book recommendations will be a little more relaxing than thinking about the construction of society. I stay away from the post-apocalyptic because I absolutely need to escape into fantasy when it's

time for my personal reading. So what are you recommending to friends these days from your reading list? Tell me about three of your favorite books. Oh, wow. Okay. That's tricky if I have to limit it to three, but... Or if you have more, I'll take more.

I will tell you kind of like the genre, I guess, that I like to read in. And it's a pretty big genre. It's anything before 1990. Okay. I have a secret theory that books were edited differently before about 1990 and that over

all, the quality of writing in books is not as good because in current day, because the attention to developmental editing and line editing and copy editing isn't as thorough as it used to be in the olden days, if you will, of publishing. That is so interesting. So it's very hard for me to get into a lot of modern fiction, even if I think the topic is

Sounds interesting. It's kind of like the Twilight effect. You know, the Twilight books. Who doesn't want to read a book about vampires? That's so cool. I would love to read those, but I can't get past the first page because the writing feels so overdone and overwritten and under edited, if you will.

So I really love reading old stuff. So I read old mysteries like all the Sherlock Holmes stories, Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier. That's the person who wrote Rebecca and my sister Rachel. She has all, sorry, my cousin Rachel. She has all kinds of like spooky, eerie stories. I will read lots of old science fiction. You can find,

collections of 1950s era short stories that were published in things like Galaxy or Amazing Stories that were some of the original sci-fi magazines. I can just all day long read short stories from that era. They're so...

and so well done. Even in essentially what were pulp, that was pulp fiction. The pulp magazines of that era, there's not a word out of place for someone who loves not just storytelling, but the

craft of writing, it's such a joy for me to read older fiction because you can just tell the craft that went into it, not just the original person's ideas, but everything that had to go along the way to get it to like that polished perfection at the end.

That's great. Yeah. It's, um, I will first, I have to say this is, I think this is at least the third time Agatha Christie has come up. There's a very specific, like the grammar girl guest, uh, group of people, certain type of person definitely is a guest on this show. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Same thing with her. There's never a word out of place. She can, um, give you a complete picture of somebody's personality in just a sentence and

or two. It's quite amazing. Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much, Sam. Thanks again for joining us today. And again, tell people where they can find you, please. Sure. If you want to find us, the easiest way is just come to our website, which is dragonflyeditorial.com. And you can browse around there. There's actually a lot of things that your listeners might like. We have a lot of resources for writers and editors there. There's a newsletter people can subscribe to. There's all kinds of fun stuff to download.

So yeah, dragonflyeditorial.com. Yeah, I really enjoy your newsletter actually too. Good job.

I hope you enjoyed that bonus segment. If you didn't catch the full interview, the main show, the original back in November, you can find it in your feed or linked in the show notes. And thank you again to the Grammarpalooza supporters. We appreciate your help so much. If you would like to become a Grammarpalooza supporter or subscriber and get all the bonus episodes when they first come out, you would have gotten this one back in November.

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