Featured: Nerdy Novelist YouTube Review

AI has been notoriously bad at editing text in the past, and that makes sense because these are large language models. They're meant to be generative. They generate text. They're not meant to edit text. And that's a shame, really, because I think a lot of authors would prefer to use AI for editing than for actually writing out the book because a lot of authors really enjoy the process of writing but hate the process of editing.

Thankfully, there is a tool out there that is actually pretty good at editing with AI, particularly if you're looking for the type of editing like proofreading, simple copy editing, that sort of thing. Plus, it's incredibly cheap, so let's check it out. All right, the tool is called editGPT, and you can get there at editGPT.app. They give you actually a certain amount of freebies per month. If you look at their pricing page, the free version will give you 10,000 words per month, so it will actually edit 10,000 of your words. I do find that you run through that pretty quickly, though, but you can get it free per month, so if you're just proofreading maybe a couple of articles or something like that, the free plan should be enough.

But if you want a little bit more, you can upgrade to the pro plan, which is $10 a month, which gives you 200,000 words per month, so that's going to be much more doable. This is, you know, like one to two whole books depending on how many times you're using the edit feature. If you just use it once, then you could probably get like three books in there if you wanted. It also gives you 200,000 words per request, so you can edit a little bit faster. The free one only does 600 words per request. And the $25 a month version will give you a million words per month, so if you're like a powerhouse author that needs lots of proofreading and editing and stuff, that one might be good for you.

But let's go ahead and look at what it does. So I have here a bit of AI-generated text. Now, the thing about AI-generated text is that, at least grammatically, it's actually pretty good already. There's usually very few improvements that an AI can make on AI-written text, right? But there are more options here besides proofreading. So there's just like regular grammar, and if you hover on over these, you'll see what the prompt is. Proofread this but only fix grammar. Proofread this lightly. Proofread this; you can say fix only awkward parts. Streamline any awkward words or phrases. Proofread this improving clarity and flow. Rewrite this improving clarity and flow. Formalise can make it concise, and you can actually add your own here as well if you want.

It doesn't take really complex prompts, though; if you're really into prompting for editing and stuff, this isn't really the place to do it. What this does that you can't really do inside of just any old ChatGPT or Novel Crafter or any of those tools is it will actually give you a very clear look at the changes that have been made, so you can easily approve them or disapprove them. So for AI-written text like this, we're going to try something instead of just proofread because it's already pretty solid in terms of proofreading. We're going to say streamline. We're going to say streamline any awkward words or phrases and see if it can make the text any better.

As you can see, it's giving us some text here, and it's basically making it like track changes in Word, so you can easily see what was there and what the change has been made. So we have, like, the outline was unmistakably feminine, and it added the word excluding. I'm not sure I like that word. A sinister grace as it loomed over her instead of in the way it loomed over her. So it definitely made it more streamlined, used fewer words, which is sometimes okay, but I actually think in the way it loomed over her is better. Mina's breath, now purely habitual instead of purely habitual, now came in unnecessary gasps instead of unneeded gasps. Yeah, I think that one's a little bit better. Definitely flows better.

So I can go ahead and for each of these I can either say, you know, accept or reject. Say if I didn't like this excluding, I'll just reject that. But we're using AI text here, and I've actually found the tools like this don't help too much to make the AI better because it's using AI to fix AI, and it's not one of those things the AI is going to be better at. But if you've been heavily editing the AI or you wrote something yourself, then you're going to need someone to take a look at the grammar and spelling of that stuff.

So let's take a look at some human-written prose. This has been edited thoroughly by me and by a proofreader in the past, so this should be good prose, right? Like this should be good text. But this is human-written text. I'm just going to copy this chapter from one of my books. I'm going to bring it into editGPT and we're going to run just the proofread button here. So I hit the proofread button, and already, like, the first sentence it's giving me something that I got wrong in the proofreading and that my proofreader missed as well. Well, now Gabriel rubbed his chin, comma, and this should be capitalised. You know there are no gifters in your vision.

So I would accept this. So now it says, you know, capitalised. So I had it capitalised. It shouldn't be capitalised here because I had a comma there. So in this case, I would just say accept and it would change that. And as we go further down, I could see it's like adding a comma here. Got rid of a period and added a comma. Paul got his enhanced strength. Okay, so this it got wrong because I capitalised the word strength because it's a proper noun in this particular context in the world building here. So this is an example of one I would reject. I reject this one too.

But as I go down, like, I can see, yeah, this is better there. And pretty much all of them, with the exception of the one I just showed you, things that are unique to my world, like capitalising certain names or things like that, it pretty much gets the grammar part, the proofreading part, right every single time. I have not found any problems that were not like a part of my world. And it has significantly helped me with the grammar here on this. And this one's not too bad. This is still a pretty clean manuscript because I've been through it a couple of times. The proofreader went through it.

If I go through like this chapter here from my upcoming plot module book, which I wrote this particular chapter, and it has not been read by a proofreader yet. So if I put this into editGPT. Now say proofread. Okay, so we added a comma here. Changed the number three to spelling out the three. Yep, I know that's correct. Added an s or took off the s there. Yep, that's correct. Yeah, so it's added quite a few things here. It's caught on a number of options. So this is going to help me clean up my manuscripts from a proofreading perspective. It's going to make it so much easier. And only for ten dollars a month to do like two or so books per month. That's pretty great.

So I'm actually really thrilled with this. This is going to be replacing a lot of the tools that I use for proofreading specifically. There are still tools like AutoCrit out there. In fact, let's comment on this because I know a lot of you are going to ask what about AutoCrit? What about ProWritingAid? I do think that this is better for proofreading specifically on human-written text than anything else I've seen out there. So that's one thing. But AutoCrit is really better for line editing and making sure you have things that sound natural and you're not overusing words and stuff like that. That's something that this cannot really handle.

It's too much of a thing that you have to think about for the AI to get it. Like, the AI knows if the grammar is wrong or not. The AI knows when it's appropriate to use a comma or not. It's not necessarily going to know what's a better way to phrase the sentence without an adverb. You know, it's not good at that sort of thing. ProWritingAid is also similar. I mean, ProWritingAid has grammar and spelling features as well. I think this does better on those specific issues.

But ProWritingAid also has a lot of the same things that AutoCrit will provide for you. And so I'd say basically the same thing about ProWritingAid as I say about this. So I think this is good for proofreading specifically, but everything else I would still choose either AutoCrit or ProWritingAid. I plan on doing a versus on those two in the near future because I think they're both very different, and we'll get to that in a future video. But for now, I think if you're only looking for a proofreading assessment, this is probably the best that you're going to get, and it'll make the whole thing pretty simple.

And it catches more than a proofreader does, at least the ones that I've hired in the past. So I hope this was useful for you, and if you want to know more about AutoCrit, which I just mentioned, I have several videos, but you can check out this one which goes into some of the AI features that AutoCrit has, which I think are amazing. So check that out, and I will see you in the next video.