A friend sent me a link to WriteLab, an AI-based prose editor. The company was founded in 2013 and an early investor was Mitch Kapor's Kapor Capital. (Kapor founded Lotus, a predecessor to Excel.)
Given the amount of writing I do, I had to sign up for a free trial. I took it for a test drive using a chapter from my next book. The chapter deals with how complexity theory applies to opportunity identification in entrepreneurship. Not a simple subject so I thought it would be a real test for the AI. A sample screen of the app, my prose and the comments is below.
I think the comments are generally excellent with very few computer style mistakes. The software is targeting a very high standard of writing, which I [modestly] define as better editing than I could do myself. I cannot figure out why editing comments are classified into seven categories, but I would guess it has something to do with how the software learns.
The setup is clunky. Just signup, ignore all the tutorials and just upload a document. It has MS Word type logic that we all understand. It will take a few minutes to get comfortable but when you realize that clicking on a comment takes you to that section of the prose, you have basically mastered the software. I am not yet confident that format is maintained.
One funny note--a computer style mistake. The computer commented on a Howard Gardner quote in my prose. Howard Gardner is a very famous education professor at Harvard. The computer did not know not to edit a quote (the edits would have improved Gardner's writing).
If you do serious writing and do not pay for editing, WriteLab is definitely helpful. Recommended for any considerate students :-)
WriteLab is further evidence that last week's story, "AI is the Paradigm Shift", is going to turn out to be correct.
Note: I rejected two changes proposed by WriteLab for this post but accepted 8 other comments.