AI, Tech, and Editing: A Pragmatic Toolbox 

with Perrin Lindelauf

When: Saturday, March 2 and March 9, 2024, 9:00 am to noon PDT

Where: Online via Zoom

The sudden proliferation of AI text tools in 2023 has upended many industries in a very short span, creating in equal parts fear, confusion, and excitement for the future.

This webinar aims to empower editors with a raft of AI tools to enhance their workflows today. It sets aside ethical debates about the technology and instead takes a pragmatic and clear-eyed look at useful tech and the direction in which the market is moving in the short term.

The first of two sessions will provide background to large language models, what the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT are, and how they will affect the work of the editor in the foreseeable future. The session will provide live examples of how ChatGPT works and offer editorial problems that it is uniquely suited to help with. Pitfalls of Large Language Models (LLMs) and editing will also be discussed.

The second session will look beyond ChatGPT, first examining lower-tech tools that some editors may not have explored yet (wildcards, macros, TextExpander, PerfectIt), as well as a sample workflow to incorporate them. Next it will cover the emerging market of writing-specific AI tools being built on top of ChatGPT or with their own proprietary LLMs: Grammarly, DeepL, Copy.AI, and any new serious contenders that have recently emerged. The session will conclude with a brief discussion of practical uses that participants can foresee in their own workflows.

Participants are encouraged to have their own free ChatGPT account and to have played with it, even briefly.

This seminar will be recorded.

Perrin Lindelauf is a copy and structural editor living in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island. He got his start as a professional writer and editor by writing travel guides about Japan for National Geographic Books. He’s a graduate of the SFU Editing Certificate program, currently working as an academic copy editor for a university publisher. A tech enthusiast, he has been fiddling with ways to increase his productivity for many years and is eager to see how new AI tools can improve both the art of communication and the editorial process alike.