1072. Is AI coming for our jobs—or just the boring parts? This week, Samantha Enslen of Dragonfly Editorial talks about how she sees AI changing the work of writers and editors. We talked about real clients, real fears, and hope for the future. Plus, Samantha shares her favorite old-school fiction (spoiler: Agatha Christie strikes again!).
1072. Is AI coming for our jobs—or just the boring parts? This week, Samantha Enslen of Dragonfly Editorial talks about how she sees AI changing the work of writers and editors. We talked about real clients, real fears, and hope for the future. Plus, Samantha shares her favorite old-school fiction (spoiler: Agatha Christie strikes again!).
Find Samantha Enslen at DragonflyEditorial.com.
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Mignon: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and for the next few weeks, while we're taking a season break, we're going to release some of the best-of-the best bonus episodes that people who support the show through Grammarpalooza got during this last interview season. This week, you're going to get the behind-the-scenes conversations with Samantha Enslen — who owns a writing, editing and design agency, Dragonfly Editorial. And we're going to talk about how she thinks AI is going to affect jobs for writers and editors and how it will affect her agency.
We do these kinds of extras every time I do an interview, so almost every week. Thank you to the current Grammarpaloozians subscribers for supporting this show. We appreciate it so much, and it makes these bonuses possible. If you want to help and support the show, you can sign up on the show page at Apple Podcasts right there on the listing or separately to get everything by text message. You can go to quickanddirtytips.com/bonus to learn more and links to both of those are in the show notes.
Sam, thanks so much for being here.
Samantha: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Mignon: Yeah. So, in the main segment, we talked about how you are and aren't using AI and what we think are its pros and cons, but as someone who owns an agency that employs writers, editors, and designers, I'm so curious to hear more about what you think its effect is going to be on the job market for people.
For those kinds of people, have you been losing clients? Are you worried about losing clients? Like, I have seen people talking about losing clients. I've seen writers and editors talk about not being able to get work. And so, I'm really concerned about it. I feel like you probably have more insider insight into that than I do.
If you don't want to talk about it, that's totally fine. It's your internal business stuff.
Samantha: No, I do want to talk about it. And I think it's a fantastic question. I think we've seen some of both. I think I'll be honest with you. We have had a couple projects come in that were, for example, very simple transcription projects where, you know, every now and then somebody will have an interview like this, or there'll be a speech and they'll ask us to listen to the tapes and transcribe the interviews.
And we've gone back to them and said, yes, we can do this. You could also use an AI tool to just transcribe that for you, and then you can look at it afterwards and make sure it's correct. And they've said, "Oh, good idea. Yeah, we'll do that ourselves." I feel like that's our responsibility as a trusted advisor to our customers anyway.
I'm not … if a tool does come in handy, come about that can actually do something more quickly and easily than we can at the same level of efficiency and effectiveness, then it would be remiss on my part not to recommend that to our clients. Or if not recommended, at least we don't want to try to hide it from them.
There was another example that we had where a customer had asked us to look at several documents and just write quick summaries of them, almost like an executive summary. And I think, again, we may have mentioned, "Do you mind if we use an AI tool to help us with this?" and then as soon as we said that, they were like, "Oh, never mind. We'll do that ourselves." So be it. I'm not trying to trick our customers into giving us work or keeping work with us that truly now they can do just as well on their own.
Now, let me talk about the other side of that. We have had customers who have — okay, we have one customer who we write blog entries for or articles, and they're in the finance sector.
So again, these tend to be fairly complex topics. And they came to us and said, "Okay, we had an AI write some of these for us. Can you just review them and make sure they're okay, and make sure they're in our voice, and sound like all the rest of our collateral and make sense and all those good things?"
So we did review those, and the amount of work that we had to do to revise the AI-written blogs was more onerous and took more time than if we had just written them ourselves.
Mignon: Yeah. I've heard that from multiple people.
Samantha: And gone with our standard process of interviewing a subject matter expert, doing some independent research on our own, writing the content in what we knew to be their brand voice.
So that's a case where the customer tried to, whatever you want to say, do it on the cheap, do it efficiently, do it with AI, and it backfired because they wound up taking more time for us to fix what AI made than if we had just done it ourselves. So what my hope is that things like that are going to balance out.
What I have told our staff is if there's ways that we can start doing editing projects more efficiently. For example, one of the low-hanging fruits you could say in editing projects is editing reference lists or bibliographies. Things that are at the end of a research article that's author last name, author first name, publication, article name, volume, number.
And this has to be italics and this has to be in quotation marks. And this has to be in italics ,and there's a colon goes here, and a period goes here. It's extremely tedious work because, especially because different journals have different styles. The APA, the American Psychological Association might want you to italicize these words, whereas AMA, American Medical Association, wants you to italicize these different words.
And one of them wants you to put the volume number in parentheses, and one of them wants you to have a colon after it. Some of the AIs, for example, have gotten, you could, they're actually good enough right now where you could plop a reference list in and say, "Please edit this according to AMA style" or "Chicago style" or "AP style," or what have you. And it's going to get it 90 or 95 percent of the way correct. Now again, we still want to have a human editor go behind and check. And it will do some things sometimes weird. If you had a citation that didn't have a city or state, it will make up a city and state for the publication, or it will make up the name of a missing author.
So you do have to be careful and check behind. It can do a lot of that. I think for any copy editor, any editor, that's still going to be boring and tedious work editing a reference list. If we have a report and we can spend the most, our valuable time editing the substance of the report and refining the meaning and logic and making sure it really conveys what the customer wants to convey.
And spend less of our time on tediously editing a bibliography. That's good for us. And that's good for the customer.
Mignon: Yeah. This is what I worry about, though. Like when I was first out of college, I worked for a consulting company, and we were paid by the hour. And so if AI is making you 20 percent more efficient and taking away that tedious work — that's still somebody's job.
And so do you think or hope or plan that, okay, we'll find 20 percent more meaningful client work to fill in those hours? Or are you thinking, when you think about your own business, are you thinking, okay, we might have to budget for 10 or 20 percent less work because we're being so much more efficient?
Samantha: Again, the honest answer is I don't know. Yes. It could be that two years from now or five years from now, our agency is 20 percent smaller because that's how work has changed, and that's what the market will bear. I am gambling-on-slash-hoping is that it's the opposite. We will be freed up from some of the more mundane tasks.
So our staff has more time to focus on higher value things: writing, substantive editing, project management, proposal management, strategizing, creating—not just sitting and writing a blog— but what's the whole content strategy, marketing, and communication strategy that the company has for the whole year?
What are all the topics that should be written about? It will allow us to get involved at that higher level, if you will, work.
Mignon: Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I hope so too, I've heard people talk about AI in coding, and we didn't talk about that, but it's always also useful in, just computer programming, coding, and the person that I listened to believes that we're not going to make fewer things. That if coding becomes 50 percent more efficient, let's say, we're gonna have 50 percent more products to choose from. We're gonna have 50 percent more cool apps and games and things like that. Yeah. I do hope that's the case for editing and writing too. But I think that's what I meant when I said before that it's unavoidable because as a business owner, you can't just say we aren't gonna use spellcheck, essentially.
Like we're going to spend our time looking words up in the dictionary because that's human labor. When these tools are available, you're eventually, maybe not today, but eventually your clients are going to expect that you'll be as efficient as you can possibly be.
Samantha: Yeah. Yeah. And if we look back on the history of labor-saving devices, whether it's a dishwasher, a washing machine, a vacuum cleaner, having a personal computer.
It's not that once we invented PCs and everybody could do work on a computer, we collectively decided, whew, now we really only need a 15-hour work week for everybody, because we can do the same amount of work; let's just everybody take a break.
Mignon: Remember the concept of the paperless office?
Samantha: Yeah, that's not happening. And I still have papers all over the floor. So yeah, I think that AI right now, it's like, "Ooh, we can do things faster." But that just means that it's going to allow us to do more. I'm not sure we have a paradigm where, "Oh, let’s everybody relax and take it easy" in our society right now.
Mignon: Let's actually imagine we're going to relax because I also want to hear your book recommendations. So unless you're recommending a post-apocalyptic fiction, hopefully your book recommendations will be a little more relaxing than thinking about the destruction of society.
Samantha: I stay away from the post-apocalyptic because I absolutely need to escape into a fantasy when it's time for my personal reading.
Mignon: So what are you recommending to friends these days from your reading list? Tell me about three of your favorite books.
Samantha: Oh, wow. Okay. That's tricky if I have to limit it to three, but or if you have more, I'll take more. I will tell you like the genre, I guess, that I like to read in, and it's a pretty big genre:
It's anything before 1990. I have a secret theory that books were edited differently before about 1990, and that overall the quality of writing in books is not as good because in current day, because the attention to developmental editing, and line editing, and copy editing isn't as thorough as it used to be in the olden days, if you will, of publishing.
Mignon: That is so interesting.
Sam: So it's very hard for me to get into a lot of modern fiction, even if I think the topic sounds interesting. It's like the "Twilight" effect — the "Twilight" books. Who doesn't want to read a book about vampires? That's so cool. I would love to read those, but I can't get past the first page because the writing feels so overdone and overwritten and under-edited, if you will.
So I really love reading old stuff. So I read old mysteries like all the Sherlock Holmes stories, Agatha Christie, and Daphne du Maurier — that's the person who wrote "Rebecca." "My sister Rachel," sorry, "My Cousin Rachel." She has all kinds of spooky, eerie stories. I will read lots of old science fiction.
You can find collections of 1950s-era short stories that were published in things like "Galaxy" or "Amazing Stories" that were some of the original sci-fi magazines. I can just all day long read short stories from that era. They're refreshing and so well done, even in essentially what were pulp magazines of that era.
There's not a word out of place for someone who loves not just storytelling, but the craft of writing. It's such a joy for me to read older fiction, because you can just tell the craft that went into it, not just the original person's ideas, but everything that had to go along the way to get it to that polished perfection at the end.
Mignon: That's great. Yeah. I will first, I have to say this is, I think this is at least the third time Agatha Christie has come up. There's a very specific, like the Grammar Girl guest group of people. A certain type of person definitely is a guest on this show.
Samantha: Same thing with her. There's never a word out of place. She can give you a complete picture of somebody's personality in just a sentence or two. It's quite amazing. Yeah.
Mignon: Great. Thank you so much, Sam. Thanks again for joining us today. And again, tell people where they can find you, please.
Samantha: Sure. If you want to find us, the easiest way is just come to our website, which is dragonflyeditorial.com, and you can browse around there. There's actually a lot of things that your listeners might like. We have a lot of resources for writers and editors there. There's a newsletter people can subscribe to.
There's all kinds of fun stuff to download. So yeah, dragonflyeditorial.com.
Mignon: Yeah. I really enjoy your newsletter, actually, too. Good job.
I hope you enjoyed that bonus segment. If you didn't catch the full interview, the main show, back in November, you can find it in your feed or linked in the show notes. And thank you again to the Grammarpalooza supporters. We appreciate your help so much! If you'd like to become a Grammarpalooza supporter or subscriber and get all the bonus episodes when they first come out — you would have gotten this one back in November — and more importantly just help us and show your appreciation for the show, You can sign up on the show page, the Grammar Girl Show page at Apple Podcasts, or to get everything by text message through Subtext, and links to both of those are in the show notes and you can also find more information at QuickAndDirtyTips.com/bonus.
That's all. Thanks for listening.