The emergence of AI has turbocharged the ESL academic-editing domain. Most of the market-leading ESL editing firms have invested in AI and produced AI tools, while smaller firms are racing to catch up.

This is a worrying development because AI large language models are designed to assimilate the text they correct. Such systems absorb and analyse large numbers of documents, using the words and phrases they contain to create new content in the same style.

The American Authors’ Guild has explained the risks of AI ‘training’ in a 2023 open letter, which calls on the CEOs of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM, and Microsoft to address ‘the inherent injustice in exploiting our works as part of your AI systems without our consent, credit, or compensation’:

Generative AI technologies built on large language models owe their existence to our writings. These technologies mimic and regurgitate our language, stories, style, and ideas. Millions of copyrighted books, articles, essays, and poetry provide the ‘food’ for AI systems, endless meals for which there has been no bill.

‘Open letter’, Authors’ Guild, 30 June 2023, accessed 25 July 2023, https://authorsguild.org/news/sign-our-open-letter-to-generative-ai-leaders

The UK Society of Authors is calling for ‘consent, transparency, and the protection of authorship’:

The AI development race is opaque, unfettered and unregulated, and driven primarily by the profit motives of large corporations, despite some likely adverse impacts. The ethical and moral ramifications of these AI systems are complex, and the legal ramifications are not limited to the infringement of copyright’s economic rights, but may include infringement of an author’s moral rights of attribution and integrity and right to object to false attribution; infringement of data protection laws; invasions of privacy; and acts of passing off.  

‘Artificial Intelligence’, Society of Authors, accessed 25 July 2023, https://www2.societyofauthors.org/where-we-stand/artificial-intelligence

Current data-protection and privacy laws are out of date and offer no protection from this new technology. Authors, journalists, and other groups have initiated lawsuits, which may eventually result in legal redress against AI-related plagiarism, but this will take years.

In the meantime, international scholars can protect their intellectual property by investigating and choosing editing services carefully, asking direct questions about AI,  and using AI-free providers to edit their original research.

I provide a traditional, confidential editing and proofreading service to individual clients. I currently use an older version of Word and will never ‘upgrade’ to Microsoft CoPilot or any other type of AI-powered word-processing programme. If your research results are highly sensitive, I will edit your document by hand.

I will not expose your original research to any type of AI-powered grammar-checking, copyediting, proofreading, end/footnote-formatting, plagiarism-detecting, paraphrasing, or as-yet-undeveloped AI-driven software or tool.