What I Love Most About Being an Editor

And how an AI just slapped me in the face.

It’s been almost ten years since I’ve been writing on Medium, and almost as long since I’ve been putting all my energy into gathering and publishing in one place, now Scribe, writers and poets who, thanks to their words, make me live unforgettable emotions and allow thousands of readers to feel the same way. About a year ago, I published the story below.

Today I wanted to write a few words about what makes me love discovering and publishing writers more than anything else in the world. Well, I also love my family, my friends, foxes, owls, Coldplay, Roger Federer, Scarlett Johansson, my bed, blue tits, and many other things, but that’s not the subject of this story. And anyway I already wrote a story about my bed.

What I’m about to say now isn’t new, but it’s struck me so much recently that I wanted to write it down and share it here. This is the pleasure I get when I open an email from a writer who wants to publish in Scribe and discover through his words a little piece of his life and the reason why he writes.

I’m rarely touched when the email is cold and I don’t learn anything about the person in that first connection. This has a lot to do with what will happen to me and how I will feel when I read the submitted stories. If the person opens their heart in their email by telling me about themselves, even in just a few words, it’s as if they’re creating a bridge to the stories they’re sending me so that I can better dive in and enjoy the journey.

I value this bridge and this first meeting if you can call it that. This explains why I turn down a lot of pitches, even from brilliant writers who are willing to support me on Patreon. Often, the quality of the writing and the talent of the writer are not enough for me to make my decision. I need to feel that connection, which belongs to me. And while many editors wouldn’t think twice about increasing their bank balance, and even though I am infinitely grateful to everyone who has chosen to pay me every month for my work, I made the choice of writing, emotion, and human.

You got it, it is an immense gift each time I perceive the sensitivity and the humanity of the writer who writes to me. Now I want to ask myself since this is the topic of the moment, what will happen when I receive emails and stories written by AI chatbots?

You may have read it, Medium asks us what we think about AI-generated writing. The topic is much discussed on Medium, notably by Cassie Kozyrkov here, and Clive Thompson there, to name a few. All this follows the excitement that has been going on for several months around ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, an AI research laboratory based in San Francisco.

In his article, Scott Lamb asks: What does it mean for art? Does a piece of art lose meaning without a human being behind it? Does a poem about the human experience lose its impact if it’s not actually written by a human?

I think I have my own thoughts on the matter, and you can easily imagine how I would feel about an AI being asked to write poems or personal stories where the emotion is palpable.

I believe Thomas James was the first to introduce artificial intelligence into Scribe. The images he uses for his poems are generated on NightCafe which uses AIs from Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2. On the other hand, everything leads me to believe that his pieces come from his human heart! And if there is any deception, I totally missed it.

I find it hard to believe that human creativity and sensitivity can be found in a text generated by an AI. I mean, a text that has something literary, like a poem or something totally personal.

Can artificial intelligence feel emotions and be able to transmit them as a human would? Can an AI play with metaphors and figures of speech like a poet can? Is it capable of humor and making people laugh? Can an AI evoke tears with a thought or a few well-turned lines? Can artificial intelligence serve humans who use writing as a form of artistic expression? Again, I find it hard to imagine.

For other forms of writing, or in the case where we consider AI as a tool for creation, I can definitely hear it. Clive Thompson expresses it quite rightly in his post. Text generators as a writing companion to help us in certain specific cases, let’s admit it. But stories created from scratch by an AI…

As an editor and a sensitive person, you’ve guessed it, I don’t think I’m ready to converse with AIs, no matter how well-trained they are by humans. The beauty of Medium is the ability of humans to speak from the heart and convey emotions, right? Shouldn’t we stay focused on our humanity? Or we should start asking ourselves why we create…

Wait, are you still here? I just fell off my chair! As I finish these lines, I just read and published this piece written by Fiona Cameron Lister, a real human. It ends with this: Well, which do you prefer? Does the ChatGPT truly have a poet’s soul? I am lost, the AI seems to have a poet’s soul.

I assure you that Fiona and I did not agree to write our respective stories. She’ll tell you that. My reasoning has just been slapped in the face without me seeing it coming. Am I going to spend my evening with the bot? Will humans continue to write? Only time will tell.