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It’s possible this is caused by the editors rather than the authors. An old partner edited papers for a large publisher - largely written by non-native speaker
by silver_silver 2y ago
It’s possible this is caused by the editors rather than the authors.
An old partner edited papers for a large publisher - largely written by non-native speakers and already heavily machine translated - and would almost always use ChatGPT for the first pass when extensive changes were needed.
She was paid by the word and also had a pretty intense daily minimum quota so it was practically required to get enough done to earn a liveable wage and avoid being replaced by another remote “contractor”.
- cortesoft 2y agoThis seems strange… this is an old partner, who had a job long enough to know that the only way to hit a quota to was to use ChatGPT, which came out less than two years ago? It seems strange that something that experimental became essential that quickly.
- noizejoy 2y ago> this is an old partner “Old” might be intended to mean “former” or “ex”, which could be as recent as merely weeks ago. (i.e. ESL / lost in translation issue).
- cortesoft 2y agoI took it to mean ex, but even if it was only a week ago, for a tool to become essential within a year of existing is pretty crazy.
- knodi123 2y agoNo kidding... but it did. I have an aunt who's an editor, and she was basically put out of business by chatgpt. She still gets paid by the same people for the same work, but her rate has been slashed, and since she has no interest in using chatgpt, she'll never make it up in volume.
- silver_silver 2y agoThe company is a bit predatory in that they typically employ editors from poorer countries, so her difficulty was more making enough from it than meeting the quota - but the quota was strict enough that you would very quickly lose the position if you kept missing it. I think the situation before ChatGPT was that they employed people who worked very long hours to not earn very much. Apparently turnover was quite high.
- progval 2y agoDo editors even change the text in academic publishing?
- Maken 2y agoThey do in journals that charge such an exorbitant rate it would look bad if they did not try to justify it.
- JohnKemeny 2y agoI have never had an editor change a single word in my papers.
- silver_silver 2y agoMost of the papers she worked on were either translations or not written by a native speaker.
- userabchn 2y agoI am an associate editor of a journal and I have suggested that the journal strongly encourage authors to pass their papers through an LLM before submitting if they think it might need it. A large fraction of the submissions we receive have terrible grammar and unnatural phrasing. The only options for editors are to reject or send out for review. Rejecting because of the grammar seems overly harsh, but I know that it is a lot more laborious to review a paper with bad grammar. The easiest fix seems to be to try to ensure that the grammar is reasonable before papers are submitted.