To the many people who regularly complain about spelling and grammar errors, dropped words and what they see as nonsensical writing on our platforms, I finally have some news to make you feel better. Help is on the way, courtesy of artificial intelligence. Yes, that mysterious new technology that readers keep telling me we shouldn’t use because it will mean the end of trusted journalism. That’s silly, of course. It’s just a tool, and in this case, one that will make quite a few readers happy. As I’ve noted in this column previously, typos and other minor errors increased significantly over the last 15 years, as dollar-strapped newsrooms shut down their copy desks and reduced the number of eyes on content before it is published. The mistakes aggravate some readers to no end, especially current and former English teachers, and they often lay into me. I finally wrote a column in 2023 to say, “Enough!” I explained that the top priority of our limited staff is to produce as much quality content as possible – stories, podcasts, text messages, newsletters, video and more – and resist anything that impedes us. I laid out the numbers of what we produce and said we were unwilling to reduce it to spend time looking for typos. In other words, I said live with it, as we are doing our best. After I published it, whenever someone sent me a complaint, I responded with the link to that column. I can’t do that anymore. AI leaves us no excuses for the errors. Starting this month, anyone in our newsroom who writes – including me -- must run their work through a tool we’ve developed to clean it up. It’s a tool called Editor’s Eyes, developed in-house by David Cohn, the AI savant for our parent company, Advance Local. David has taken our breath away with the number of tools he has developed for us this year. Writers need only paste their work into the tool, and seconds later they get a list of fixes they can make, with advice for making it read better. In effect, it gives every writer their own personal copy desk. You should notice results immediately. AI can be so much more for our writers than a copy editor. For those who embrace it, AI can be a full-time reporting and writing partner, a constant companion with whom they can converse and receive thoughtful responses. I have an AI window open on my browser all day and repeatedly go to it with questions, quick editing and other tasks. I’ve been writing a good bit about AI this year because it is so rapidly changing how we do our jobs. No evolution in our history has come faster or with as much potential to make us better. I mentioned in an earlier column that we think we can use AI to get back to comprehensive local news coverage. We’re at work on tools to make that work, and each day we get closer. We’re not stopping there. In recent months, we’ve developed tools that can help us produce all sorts of stories we have not had the resources to tackle, to the point where I think we’ll need a new version of an old newsroom staple called a rewrite desk. A rewrite desk? Decades ago, one of the first stops for new reporters was the rewrite desk. Back before computers and cell phones, reporters in the field would collect the news and call the rewrite desk, usually from pay phones. They would dictate a mostly written story or just pass along the facts. The folks on the rewrite desk would then churn out the stories and send them along to copy desks for eventual placement in print. The old system worked. Rewrite desks were terrific for teaching young journalists to write. Many entered the field thinking they were writers but quickly learned what they didn’t know. Working the rewrite desk made them proficient and fast, and working with all that content taught them much about their new cities. We have no such entry level training ground today, but I’m envisioning something similar to a rewrite desk for AI. Instead of reporters calling in, the rewrite desk would collect content from myriad sources and use AI tools to quickly convert it into stories. People working on this new desk would have to carefully review the pieces for accuracy and clarity, and doing so likely would teach them a thing or two about writing. One thing on my mind as we consider this is bylines and credit. We’ve been including a note on stories if AI was used in any way to produce them, and I’m quickly coming to the conclusion we should end that practice. AI is a tool we use to produce stories, like many others. We never included notes on stories to say Microsoft Excel was used to produce the story. Or Adobe Acrobat. Or, taking it to the extreme, Ticonderoga pencils and Bic pens. Our institution – our editors and reporters – is what stands behind our content, no matter what tools are used to produce them. If we use Excel and make a mistake, we don’t blame Excel. We blame ourselves. If we make a mistake using AI, it is our mistake – our misuse of the tool. We have precedent for what I’m thinking. When reporters called in their notes to the rewrite desks, we usually published the stories with the reporters’ bylines. They carried no notes saying the rewrite desk was used to produce the stories. When an editor rewrites a story from top to bottom, we don’t say the story was produced with the editor’s rewrite. My problem with our crediting of AI stories is that readers, having read about atrocious mistakes elsewhere, incorrectly interpret those notes to believe that AI did all the work. That’s just not the case. I haven’t made a decision to change that credit line, as I’m still mulling. For now, readers will benefit from AI in seeing far fewer minor mistakes in our stories, which should improve the mood of English teachers all over Northeast Ohio. And I’ll keep reporting to you on how AI is changing the way we do our jobs. I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com Thanks for reading. | 