Emotional intelligence

• HOUSTON, Feb. 29, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Houston-based real estate title and escrow agency, Sage Title Company, is pleased to announce the addition of Laina Hammond as the company's first Chief Operating Officer.
• Ms. Hammond, who co-owns Sage Title with her husband, CEO Read Hammond, brings more than two decades of legal and leadership experience into her new role.
• Prior to joining Sage Title, Ms. Hammond served as Managing Director of litigation finance firm Validity Finance and as Principal of Houston law firm Shipley Snell Montgomery LLP.
• "Sage Title is at an important inflection point and poised for substantial growth in the coming years," said Read Hammond.

• The company focuses on continued innovation to fulfill the ever-changing requirements of clients and their end customers and to help them stay relevant for the future.
• Teleperformance emphasizes long-lasting customer relationships and relevant technologies and processes, strengthening its brand and accelerating great commercial success.
• The company delivers a complete portfolio of digital transformation solutions and enhanced CX to brand leaders worldwide, from APAC delivery locations.
• Teleperformance has established an unmatched footprint among CX outsourcing providers, with 11 service delivery markets in APAC.

• The Antonio Ricardo Cannady Act (ARCA) initiative will pressure Congress and the United States Board of Education to mandate emotional intelligence courses.
• These are the words of Antonio Ricardo Cannady, the organizer behind the Antonio Ricardo Cannady Act (ARCA) initiative, who says that it's not only necessary that Congress and the United States Board of Education intervene and vote ARCA into federal law and that it's their duty to do so.
• After all, single parents are too busy earning a living to raise their children, and the educational system isn't required to do so.
• Here is an example of ARCA at work in the classroom.

• We are professional editors, with extensive experience in the Australian book publishing industry, who wanted to know how ChatGPT would perform when compared to a human editor.
• To find out, we decided to ask it to edit a short story that had already been worked on by human editors – and we compared the results.

The experiment: ChatGPT vs human editors

• The story we chose, The Ninch (written by Rose), had gone through three separate rounds of editing, with four human editors (and a typesetter).
• The first version had been rejected by literary journal Overland, but its fiction editor Claire Corbett had given generous feedback.
• We had a wealth of human feedback to compare ChatGPT’s recommendations with.
• By comparing it with human examples, we tried to determine where and at what stage in the process ChatGPT might be most successful as an editorial tool.

Round 1: the first draft

• (Authors submitting stories to magazines and journals generally don’t give human editors a detailed, prescriptive brief.)
• Interestingly, ChatGPT did not pick up that the story was now published and attributed to an author.
• Nor did it define the genre, which is one of the first assessments an editor makes.
• And the advice for more foreshadowing, dialogue and description, along with shorter paragraphs and an alternative ending, was generally sound.

Stage two: AI (re)writes

• Could you please suggest places in the story where the pace needs to speed up or slow down?
• Could you please suggest places where there is too much imagery and it needs more action storytelling instead?
• Could you please suggest places in the story where the pace needs to speed up or slow down?
• Could you please suggest places where there is too much imagery and it needs more action storytelling instead?
• ChatGPT also changed the text from Australian English (which all Australian publications require) to US spelling and style (“realization”, “mom”).

What did the human editors do?

• The biggest problem is that final transition – I don’t know how to read the narrator.
• For me stories are driven by choices and I’m not clear what decision our narrator, or anyone else, in the story faces.
• It’s entirely possible I’m not getting something important, but I think that if I’m not getting it, our readers won’t either.
• It incorporates intellectual, creative and emotional capital – all gained from lived experience, complemented by technical skills and industry expertise, applied through the prism of human understanding.
• (After all, the author doesn’t have to do what we say – ours is a persuasive profession.)

Round 2: the revised story

• Next, we submitted a revised draft that had addressed Claire’s suggestions and incorporated the conversations with Nicola.
• Again, it didn’t pick up that the story had already been published, nor did it clearly identify the genre.
• It was a laborious process: the 2,500-word piece had to be submitted in chunks of 300–500 words and the revised sections manually combined.
• Read more:
  'The entire industry is based on hunches': is Australian publishing an art, a science or a gamble?

Round 3: our final submission

• In the third and final round of the experiment, we submitted the draft that had been accepted by Meanjin.
• This time, we followed up with separate prompts for each element we wanted ChatGPT to review: title, pacing, imagery/description.
• ChatGPT came back with suggestions for how to revise specific parts of the text, but the suggestions were once again formulaic.
• There was no attempt to offer – or support – any decision to go against familiar tropes.

Sometimes editorial expertise shows itself in not changing a text. Different isn’t necessarily good. It takes an expert to recognise when a story is working just fine. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It also takes a certain kind of aerial, bird’s-eye view to notice when the way type is set creates ambiguities in the text. Typesetters really are akin to editors.

The verdict: can ChatGPT edit?

• But we recommend editors and authors don’t ask it to give individual assessments or expert interventions any time soon.
• A major problem that emerged early in this experiment involved ethics: ChatGPT did not ask for or verify the authorship of our story.
• Human editors demonstrate their credentials through their work history, and keep their experience up-to-date with professional training and qualifications.
• In Rose’s case, her oceanic allegory about difference, with a nod to the supernatural, was turned it into a story about a fish.

ChatGPT is ‘like the new intern’

• AI suggestions can be scrutinised – and integrated or dismissed – by authors or editors during the creative process.
• But when used by human editors, it’s like any other tool – as good, or bad, as the tradesperson who wields it.

• Renée Otmar is affiliated with the Institute of Professional Editors, the Australian Society of Authors, Writers Victoria, Small Press Network and Life Stories Australia.
• She is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Faculty of Health, Deakin University.