By Cecile Shanahan
Around 40 people attended live – and many others registered (giving them access to the recording to watch at a later stage) – for Zia Rachko-Knight’s presentation on AI and how it is used in the editing of educational texts in Australia.
Zia walked us through the premise, process, problems and possibilities in outsourcing editing to AI-driven entities.
The premise was explained as a streamlining of processes globally, so every company branch had the same structure with the hope that everything would be in one place, which would result in making producing content easier, faster and cheaper.
The process involved a third party becoming involved (no longer just the commissioning editor/project manager talking directly to the editor and the author). This other party controls the AI systems that do the “work”.
The problems were concerns about the ethical and environmental impacts, the disproportionate wealth distribution and the US-centric nature of the whole cycle of “work”.
There was a lot to think about from the presentation but, thankfully, the possibilities offered some signs of hope for editors. That there are some smaller educational publishing companies using humans to do all the work while becoming real competitors for the big five educational publishers was the real stand-out take away from the presentation.