AI & SOCIETY

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01707-z

OPEN FORUM

The galloping editor

Gabriel Lanyi1

Received: 15 April 2023 / Accepted: 30 May 2023

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2023

Abstract
Classical natural language processing endeavored to understand the language of native speakers. When this proved to lie
beyond the horizon, a scaled-down version settled for text analysis and processing but retained the old name and acronym.
But text ≠ language. Any combination of signs and symbols qualifies as text. Language presupposes meaning, which is
what connects it to real life. Failing to distinguish between the two results in confusing humanoids (machines thinking like
humans) with machinoids (humans thinking like machines). As scientific English (SciEng) became the lingua franca of
science, it has acquired all the traits of a machine language: reduced vocabulary, where fewer and fewer words have taken
on more and more meanings; prescribed use of pronouns; depersonalized rigid syntactic forms and rules of composition.
Compliance with SciEng standards can be automatically verified, which means that Sci Eng can be automatically imitated,
what is referred to as AI writing (ChatGPT). The article discusses an attempt to automatically correct deviations from the
rules by what is touted as AI editing.

Keywords Natural language processing · Scientific English · SciEng · Meaning · Machinoids · Humanoids

1 Introduction was dispatched “with all my imperfections on my head.”

In the days when artificial intelligence referred to the intel-
ligence of humanoids (machines thinking like humans) not
machinoids (humans thinking like machines), natural lan-
guage processing envisioned a prospective ability of soft-
ware to understand the language of native speakers. In prac-
tical terms, the goal of developers of NLP was to feed a text
to the program and ask it questions of the type that appear on
reading comprehension tests, and for the program to answer
them correctly, proving that it understood the text with all its
nuances. To do so, the program would need to know much
of what the writer or speaker knows. This is what reading
comprehension tests test: how much of what a writer knows
we know. (To fully understand what Dickens wrote, we need
to know what he knew as he was writing it. Every place we
fall short, we need a footnote to help us out. When fashion-
able Lady Dedlock of the flawless hair comes up to Lon-
don “with all her perfections on her head,” the untutored
reader may wonder briefly at the uncommon expression if
it does not bring to mind the ghost of Hamlet’s father who
* Gabriel Lanyi
gabilanyi@gmail.com
1
e-Doc, Ltd., Mevaseret, Israel
There is irony in the parallel between the imperfection of
the ghost’s conscience and the perfection of Lady Dedlock’s
hair—one hardly more alive than the other—which is lost
without this knowledge.)
In the late 1970s, Janet Kolodner's program, CYRUS
(Computerized Yale Retrieval and Updating System) was
fed stories about the life of Cyrus Vance, then US Secretary
of State, to get it to know what Vance knew. When CYRUS
was asked whether Vance had met Moshe Dayan it answered
in the affirmative, although there was no direct mention of
such meeting in the texts it had been fed. CYRUS could
even surmise things Vance did not know, but would have
surmised himself. (A second database contained informa-
tion about Vance's successor, Edmund Muskie.) CYRUS was
intended to model human memory and intelligent informa-
tion retrieval. What made CYRUS a humanoid endeavor
was that it sought to process units of meaning (conceptual
categories), not units of text. Admittedly, it operated in a
limited universe, that of Cyrus Vance and Edmund Muskie,
but 45 years ago data storage was in the Stone Age and big
data was 20 years in the future. Since then, natural language
processing has been downgraded to analysis and manipula-
tion of mega quantities of text, and has pretty much given
up on units of meaning.

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Meaning is what connects language to real life.
Consider this sentence: "Mindful of popular sanction,
Richard reevaluated his chances to succeed."
When treated as a text string, there are many ways of pro-
cessing this sequence of words. It can be rendered in another
language (translated) in more than one way, and it can be
edited in English to eliminate some ambiguity. Is sanction
approval or censure? Is the noun form of succeed success or
succession? In real life, the ambiguities are resolved because
meaning, engrained in the fabric of the context, is clear to
speakers, listeners, and readers. The context is the knowl-
edge that the speaker and the listener share. Sanction, suc-
ceed, and the sentence as a whole mean different things if
the subject is Richard I of England, Richard III, or Richard
Nixon. And it would not be enough to tell the algorithm
which Richard we are talking about. It would need to know
quite a bit about the three Richards, and possibly about many
more. Its heuristics would need to be based on knowledge
of life.
2 Main discussion
I am a writer, editor, and translator, so I naturally check from
time to time the tools that are out there to determine how
long I have left before thinking machines put me out of busi-
ness. Recently, I came across InstaText, an application that
On the IT homepage, an animated demo shows how IT
improves the text. In the left pane is the original text. After
the user clicks “Improve text,” the edited text appears in
the right pane, with changes tracked, like in Word (deleted
text in red and struck out, inserted text highlighted and
underlined in green). The original text reads:
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AI & SOCIETY
has the uncanny ability to turn any combination of almost
random words into syntactically correct English sentences.
We live in an era that brooks no delay, and personified texts
are as impatient as their authors. Hence, InstaText.
InstaText, “a company active in artificial intelligence
and natural language processing,” makes some flamboy-
ant claims. It announces itself as an “AI-powered writ-
ing assistant. Improves styling and word choice, corrects
grammatical errors, and enriches your content.” Enriches
your content… This is one tall claim. In the academic
papers I edit, I occasionally point out elements missing
in the methodology, flag circular logic and contradictory
statements in the text, and propose alternative modes of
presentation, but I would never presume to enrich the con-
tent of the manuscript. Doing so would mean that in an
article on constitutional law or physiology I would suggest
a new interpretation of a Supreme Court ruling or a dif-
ferent biomarker, mediation model, or statistical analysis.
A modicum of modesty would inspire greater confidence
in a product that offers its services as your trusty assis-
tant. “Make your writing stand out,” enjoins InstaText. By
eliminating grammatical errors?… “Takes your text and
makes it better” (If one of my clients wrote this, John Len-
non notwithstanding, I would improve it to “improves your
text”). “AI algorithms help you overcome language barri-
ers and write like a native speaker.” InstaText purports to
improve not only the text but the author as well. (Anyway,
who says native speakers can write?).
InstaText works as a rewriter that can that can
rephrase, paraphrase or correct my sentence, para-
graph or even entire article.
The improved text appears in the right pane:
AI & SOCIETY

InstaText works like rewriter that can rephrase, para- Not great (“il” refers to “ton corps” or your body,
phrase or correct my sentence, paragraph or even an although Shakespeare makes no mention of body), but pass-
entire article. able. Instead, GT goes for it using its neural machine and
produces:
This is a poor sentence by any account, starting with
the awful word, “rewriter,” and ending with the two con- Mais depuis qu'elle t'a piqué pour le plaisir des
catenated triplets. I like “works as a rewriter” much better femmes,
than “works like rewriter,” even if I overlook the missing Mon amour est à moi et tes amours utilisent leur
article, which make it sound positively Russo-Japanese. trésor.
I decided to set all this promo aside and check out
Out of perverse curiosity, I clicked the “Swap languages”
InstaText more closely on some of the manuscripts I was
arrows and GT translated it back into English. (A hundred
working, especially because of the possibility of com-
some years ago, Karinthy Frigyes, the Hungarian Mark
bining it with Google Translate. GT does not purport to
Twain, translated a poem by Ady Endre, I come from the
deliver syntactical text, but what if I drop the GT output
banks of the Ganges, into German, making all the wrong
into InstaText and end up with syntactical English text?
decisions, translated it back into Hungarian making a few
Presto! Instant translation. Not so fast…
more wrong choices, then back into German again and once
It is difficult to overstate the utility of GT and not to
more back into Hungarian, by which time the poem was
marvel at the clever way in which it disentangles compli-
not only unrecognizably and hilariously zany, but all the
cated sentences, often containing errors of syntax in the
wrong choices were methodically accounted for, which made
original, and renders them accurately in translation. This
the exercise even funnier.) Instead of reverting to the origi-
is all the more amazing given that GT provides ample evi-
nal, GT, like Karinthy, translated the translation back into
dence of having no inkling of the meaning of the text. But
English:
GT makes no inflated claims about what it does. It does
not purport to teach you how to translate or to turn you But since she stole you for the pleasure of women,
into a better translator. It does not promise to boost your My love is mine and your loves use their treasure.
career or to wow your dean.
To come full circle, InstaText improved this to “…
Google refers to its method as neural machine transla-
your loved ones use her treasure.” InstaText claims that
tion, with a hat tip to artificial intelligence, neurons being
“Improvements are suggested based on the broader context
the thinking cells in our brains. But one does not have to be
of the topic.” Ignoring for a moment the hint at natural lan-
Douglas Hofstadter to show that GT is processing text, not
guage processing, I wondered what in the broader context
meaning. Several years ago, in a dazzling display involving
of the topic made it replace “your loves” with “your loved
translations to or from French, German, and Chinese, Hof-
ones” and “their” with “her,” both widely off the mark.
stadter put GT through its paces in The Atlantic (Hofstad-
Despite its ability to whip often incoherent sentences
ter 2018). For the exercise in Chinese, he turned to literary
into correct English syntax, InstaText is hampered by
language to make his point, where real language resides.
severe personality problems, possibly inherited from
Naturally, GT made a complete hash of much of the text.
its developers and promoters. The worst of these is an
This is not surprising. There was no published translation of
obsessive attempt to show how hard it works for you as
the text chosen by Hofstadter in the target language. What
your writing assistant. No matter what text you drop into
surprised me was that even when there are such translations,
the left pane of InstaText, you are sure to end up with an
GT ignores them.
extensively edited and colorful output in the right pane.
I dropped these two lines into GT to see what it comes
Even if it chooses to add only an s at the end of a long
up with in French:
word, InstaText will replace all of “environment” with
But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure, “environments.”
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure. But this is merely a cosmetic issue, however telling.
Much worse is that it performs a huge number of unneces-
GT is looking at billions of pages to do its job, so I
sary substitutions of words with their near synonyms. The
expected it to say immediately, "Aha! The infamous Sonnet
first rule of any editor, machine or human, is not to do this
20," and show me a published French translation, perhaps
without understanding what the text says. Changing "coer-
even a choice of several. Here is one possibility:
cive bureaucratic structure" to "compelling bureaucratic
Mais puisqu'il est formé pour le désir des femmes, structure" is plain wrong even if in some contexts “coer-
Ton amour est pour moi, le plaisir est pour elles. cive” and “compelling” may be interchangeable and even
if statistically “compelling” appears more frequently in the
company of “structure.” One should never attempt such a

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substitution without understanding the text. Some substitu-
tions were completely off the wall: enabling → supportive;
accounts for → increases; commitment → engagement (not
the same thing); recent → current; Abstract → Summary
(right below the title of an article); Figures → Numbers (in
an academic article). Again, even if statistical analysis shows
that "current" appears in a given context more frequently
than "recent," a higher degree of confidence is required to
make the change because the damage in an infelicitous sub-
stitution is greater than the benefit in a felicitous one.
If you cannot query the author, and InstaText cannot, the
fundamental rule should be: when in doubt, do nothing. It is
much less embarrassing to miss a possible correction than to
break a correct sentence or phrase. The same goes for com-
pletely meaningless and pointless value-neutral substitutions
like nevertheless → nonetheless.
Another baffling feature of InstaText is to edit text inside
quotation marks. Admittedly, some quoted text bears editing,
but it is a fair assumption that passages you quote you do
not want changed. At least, users should have the option to
exclude text within quotation marks from improving.
Although InstaText makes much of the broader context
of the text it is editing, it limits the text you can drop into
its left pane to 10 K characters (about 1500 words). This
limitation prevents it from gaining a global view of the
text. How many times is "for instance" used in ten pages?
Is it justified or a mannerism?
Finally, InstaText clearly suffers from jet lag or some
other transatlantic bug because it consistently replaces
"analyses" (the noun) with "analyzes."
I wondered whether InstaText would recognize a page
by Dickens, but I tried something simpler and I dropped
in the masterful opening lines of Winnie the Pooh, which
would be difficult to improve upon.
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump,
bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Chris-
topher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way
of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that
there really is another way, if only he could stop
bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he
feels that perhaps there is not. Anyhow, here he is
at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you.
Winnie-the-Pooh.
When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are
going to say, "But I thought he was a boy?"
"So did I," said Christopher Robin.
"Then you can't call him Winnie?"
"I don't."
"But you said——"
"He's Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don't you know what 'ther'
means?"
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AI & SOCIETY
"Ah, yes, now I do," I said quickly; and I hope you
do too, because it is all the explanation you are going
to get.
It cannot think of a more delightful way of starting a
book. This is what InstaText produced after clicking the
“Improve text” button:
Here is Edward Bear coming down the stairs now,
bump, bump, bump, on the back of the head, behind
Christopher Robin. That's the only way, as far as he
knows, to get down the stairs, but sometimes he feels
like there really is another way, if he could just stop
bumping for a moment and think about it. And then he
feels like maybe there is not. Anyway, here he is below
and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.
When I first heard his name, I said, as you will say
now, "But I thought he was a boy?"
"I thought so too," said Christopher Robin.
"Then you cannot call him Winnie?"
"I do not."
"But you said..."
"He's Winnie-ther-Pooh. Do not you know what 'ther'
means?"
"Ah, yes, now I know," I said quickly; and I hope you
know, too, because that is the only explanation you
are going to get.
Aside from a few outright mistakes, like “the head”
instead of “his head” and “below” instead of “at the bot-
tom,” plus a few weird substitutions, the result is ho hum
and tone deaf. All charm and magic are gone. A measure of
modesty would go a long way in establishing credibility and
buying goodwill for a writing assistant. A more appropriate
output would be something like: “We are busy improving
on A. A. Milne and will get back to you as soon as we have
something to show.”
Among its masses of samples of writing they consult, GT
and InstaText should refer also to the canonical texts that
define a language. Natural language is alive in good fiction,
not in the official communiques, newspaper articles, reports,
and academic papers overflowing with boilerplates, jargon,
and clichés.
3 Conclusions
InstaText may have been designed to edit not English but
scientific English (SciEng) text, the new idiom that the
Internet has crowned as the lingua franca of science. Sci-
Eng has been ground into such a fine dust by the publish-
ing mill, most notably the big science journals (BSJ) that
it has become quite indistinguishable from a machine lan-
guage. Like ChatGPT, SciEng has the fluency of an Ishiguro
AI & SOCIETY
artificial friend attending an AP English composition class;
it is similarly overpredictable and underoriginal, exuding the
self-confidence of borrowed authority and the self-awareness
of Alexa.
For a moment, it looked as though Dickens’ prophesy that
“the English tongue was somehow the mother tongue of the
whole world, only the people were too stupid to know it”
has been proven right. But SciEng should not be confused
with the language of Alice Munro, Salman Rushdie, and
Ian McEwan, although it uses some of the same vocabulary.
That language remains over the horizon (OtH) of machines.
Nor should it be confused with the language of Hobbes,
Locke, McCauley, Mill, Adam Smith, Darwin, and William
James, who with a straight face (SF) used English to state
hypotheses, report observations, and formulate theories, and
did so without compromising storytelling, which is at the
bottom of all good writing. With English-speaking coun-
tries scattered around the globe for centuries, there has never
been an academy of the English language to issue citations
for violations, and no central authority to impose standards.
Even usage dictionaries pontificate tongue-in-cheek (TiC).
English is therefore fundamentally unruly, that is, it used
to be… until it was made to comply with the rules of the
House of Springer, the Court of Elsevier, and the Diet of
Sage, which clipped its wings, reined in its disorderly hab-
its, and homogenized, pasteurized, formalized, standardized,
and globalized it in the image of SciEng, the language that
can be naturally processed by AI algorithms without risk of
harming the author’s individual voice in the absence thereof.
SciEng is the fuel in the professors’ Audis and BMWs, as
well as a few collectors’ VW bugs. Spread by self-provi-
sioned publications (SPPs), it has permeated the inhabit-
able globe, and no one is safe from it between Tonga and
Timbuktu. It is the first step toward autonomous academic
writing (AAW), which will place academic careers on a self-
sustaining path. And it is only natural that instantaneous
careers should require instantaneous text. AI tools will save
authors the inconvenience of having to put their thoughts
into words, just like Amazon Turks (ATs) save the burden-
some task of assembling undisciplined samples and con-
ducting tedious in-depth semi-structured (IDSS) interviews.
Until recently, AAW was carried out only TiC, and SF
AAW was OtH. But now, NLP can be trained to interpret
AT answers to questionnaires and select excerpts from IDSS
interviews to autonomously generate SciEng text for SPP
in BSJs.
Evolution did not shape our brains to store billions of
credit card numbers and their transactions. Machines out-
process us in most areas of life, and texts are no exception.
Whether this makes them intelligent depends on how we
define intelligence. Certainly, the algorithms trained to
detect patterns in big data do not mimic our brains. For
some time now, robots have been outperforming us in so
many fields of activity, and their humanity has become such
a common topic of debate that academic articles are seri-
ously considering the traits that robots would need for the
US Supreme Court to expand the definition of marriage to
include unions between humans and machines. For example,
"Tying the knot with a robot: Legal and philosophical foun-
dations for human-artificial intelligence matrimony" was
published last year in the journal AI & Society. But there are
still some small, trivial activities that robots are having a hell
of a time mastering and require monumental machinery and
computing infrastructure to attempt, yet which every 5-year-
old takes in stride. Ironically, tying a knot is one of them.
I think the Supreme Court should not approve humans and
robots tying the knot until they are both equally proficient
at tying a knot.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The author declares no conflict of interest.
Reference
Hofstadter, D. (2018). “The shallowness of google translate,” The
Atlantic, January 2018, https://​www.​theat​lantic.​com/​techn​ology/​
archi​ve/​2018/​01/​the-​shall​owness-​of-​google-​trans​late/​551570/.
Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to
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