After seeing this thread I had a look into this chat thing. I have 180,000 word novel I've been sitting on. I heard it would cost me about $8,000 to have it edited, as I'm thinking about self-publishing.
So, I put the first 250 words into this chat thing to see what it could do. It wanted to know the genre, the age group I was targeting etc. From the questions it asked, I had the feeling it thought I wanted it to write a book for me!
In the first 250 it added a few commas suggested I change a word which I'd used three times. They were good suggestions. We're now up to about 2,000 words of editing and I have to really be careful of its suggestions. Example,
it thought I'd used the word trunk, as in tree trunk, too many times and suggested 'stem' instead. No. Also, it wanted to polish/shorten one paragraph and the suggestions were really stupid. For example, I'm writing about a farm/ranch (I am a rancher/farmer) and it wanted to keep calling it a 'working' ranch. I told it to quit the city people talk. Out here in the Wild West we don't have toy ranches.
It's finally understanding the concept. I imagine if I left the little turd alone to write the book, after telling it the basic direction I was going, it would be comical as hell and not at all authentic.
Luckily, I'm an expert about what I'm writing about and this robot knows diddly squat about it. It actually thought an irrigation ditch would cut through the middle of a field instead of keeping to the outside edge. Maybe you can tell, I'm having a lot of fun with it.
One thing I loved was, it made me realize my great American novel wasn't for young adults. It's more for old farts, like myself.
I have to pay $20/month, but so far I think it's worth it. Before long though, I'm going to be fighting with it, especially when we get into the equine stuff.