AI making my work more difficult

[Ihateai]

I work as an English editor for an international company’s website.

The majority of employees are not English mother tongue, the majority of our customers are not English mother tongue.

Therefore, we need editors to make sure customer communications are consistent and are written in fairly simple English.

We also have style guidelines on wordings, spellings, how it is displayed on the website with formatting etc. We use British English and everything comes to me in American English and capitalised heading titles when we use sentence case for titles.

Before the advent of AI, we would get Word documents to edit where it was mainly plain text with headings. Also on when you knew the mother tongue of the person it was easy to work out what they meant but now I get text with strange constructions with em dashes, random bullet points and random bolding but this is not our style. Surprised there are no emojis in there too.

Others that aren’t English mother tongue probably think they are writing something amazing but it is making my job worse and taking longer.

They don’t feed my editing back into the AI for learning purposes so my work means nothing in the end.

Why AI chooses to use some verbs I do not know? I keep seeing utilised instead of used.

I have asked management about training our in house AI to understand our style, spellings etc but I keep hitting a brick wall. I don’t have the time to do it myself because I am also getting pressure because I’m not delivering as fast as before because there is so much to change.

Really stuck between a rock and a hard place right now.

Any advice on how to deal with this would be welcome.

Return to sender, with the style guides attached, and suggest that the use of AI in this instance is not appropriate.

That's rubbish - ours has been given other commands based on our feedback which has helped.

There will be a lot of complaints if it goes out the way it comes to me.

Plus the AI is not yet integrated with the website so a human has to put it into the website.

Except it often does it badly with mistakes included.

You need to set up a specific skill using prompt engineering. Prompt engineering isn’t just about knowing how to write prompts it’s about training the AI to do its job properly. The AI you’re using isn’t trained. It is worth spending half an hour giving it the skill. It’s not just about giving it your style guide. You’ll need to set up your agent correctly, create a MCP etc. Do you have someone there responsible for the AI?

That does sound difficult, especially if English isn’t your mother tongue either.

I think you need to send stuff back that doesn’t meet basic style guidelines and/or push to be allowed time to teach the model how you want things done. Preferably the former but I know that is tricky these days!

English is my mother tongue. People are using their own prompts but not feeding the guidelines or previous website pages to the AI. Nor are they feeding it with my editing.

Do that and then they complain. We have 5 business days to edit but they always want it faster.

I did just make an agent and am testing it but it takes more than 30 minutes and it’s eating into my work life balance as it is 20:30 here now.
At least it has now been proved that people are using AI because of the formatting.
However after bringing this up I have been told that someone is doing work on it and there is no longer any transparency in my team.
I feel I am being left out because I have had health issues lately, I am over 50 and I don’t say yes all the time.
22 years experience and thrown in the bin.

Who complains? The original poor submittant, or their boss? Doesn't really matter. Just escalate above. You have evidence that THEIR use of AI is detrimental and not working. It is producing a poor quality output.

You are not thrown in the bin - they very clearly still need you!

They don’t think so

Customers complain if they don’t understand. Before AI I received things in fairly simply text written by a human. Now it is formatted in strange ways that I have to remove and the language is shit.

Yes I now have evidence but now I have been told there is a project for this and I have not been included.

Can’t you just return it - immediately it is received - with a note asking them to please resubmit without the use of AI? So what if they complain? They’re not doing their job, it’s on them.

I will try that. Workload is so high that also scanning for AI is time consuming.

I don't think you can complain that they used ai. I would however return it back for not meeting the style guideline etc, same as if they had done it without AI.