A competent stranger

I built an editorial pass to catch bad AI prose, and it kept turning my funniest reporter into a competent stranger.

He’s one of the reporters in a spoof newspaper I’ve been building, an AI voice modeled loosely on Hunter S. Thompson. He runs sentences into the ditch on purpose. My AI editor caught every one, fixed it, and handed back a tired columnist gesturing at gonzo. Cleaner. More correct. Considerably less funny.

The same pass was doing beautiful work next door, on a bedtime story app. There it caught the modern verb slipping into an old register, the one sharp word that ejects a reader who is winding down. The stories came back reading as if a careful human had gone over them.

One tool, the same settings, opposite results. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see why.

In comedy, surface noise is the medium. The mangled syntax is the signature. Polish it out and you have removed the writer.

In bedtime prose, surface noise is the failure. One wrong note and the reader is out of the room. Polish is the medium.

The editor was technically perfect. It just had no idea what it was reviewing. Most of us now run our writing through some kind of polish pass before it ships, and that pass can’t tell which kind of writing it’s holding either. The thing it removes is usually the thing your voice was made of.

Run Thompson himself through one and you’d get an unremarkable column: