Why AI Cannot be Your Critique Partner

(And How to Critique Your Own Work)

by Rochelle Melander

Writers have been telling me they use AI only to edit their work.

They’re not just using spell check or Grammarly. They’re uploading their work into Claude or ChatGPT and asking it to provide a critique or clean up the grammar.

I get it. You’re busy. It helps to have support. And AI is easy and free.

But don’t let AI critique or edit your work.

There are several reasons for my warning:

AI trains on your work

You’re giving AI and anyone who uses AI your content: your ideas, your phrases, your beautiful work. The founders of AI have already stolen so much of our work—our books, social media articles, blog posts, and poems. Don’t feed the monster.

AI tells you what you want to hear

AI has a positivity bias, so it’s not able to honestly critique your work. But that’s not the only problem with using AI as a critique partner. AI lacks emotional intelligence, does not understand subtext, and cannot always follow complicated or nuanced arguments. When it comes to feedback, AI will lean toward editing your work by making it grammatically correct. But none of that matters if your essay doesn’t make sense. And don’t forget: AI may introduce mistakes.

AI revises your work to sound like AI

When AI edits your manuscript, it will read like you used AI to write it. AI doesn’t have a robust voice. But it does have a style: it’s flat and vapid. AI-created or edited writing reads like it should make sense, but it doesn’t. You won’t have as many technical errors. You’ll have smoother sentences and nice, big words. But your tone will be flat. Readers will wonder what happened to you.

Here’s the point: AI can do many things. It’s helpful for fetching research. I’ve also used it to help me create a business plan.

But AI cannot give you a good critique.

And the biggest reason to avoid using AI to critique your work?

You give AI the best part of the writing process

You are your most important critique partner.

You know what you want to create and how you want it to land with your readers.

When you outsource the critiquing or revising to a machine, you give AI the part of the process that matters.

We tend to look at writing as the mad scribbling of our first draft, trying to get all the ideas on paper. It may feel good to hand it off to a computer.

But the real writing work happens when you critically evaluate and revise your words.

• You ask and answer analytical questions.
• You imagine how a reader might understand your prose.
• You find phrases to replace the cliches that come with first drafts.

To support you in critiquing and revising your work, I’ve made a tool for you.