General Discussion

Even the best and most authoritative authors need assistance in ensuring their ideas are expressed clearly and that they haven't had inadvertent mental glitches, even before you get anywhere near fact-checking.

Those who aren't the best sometimes need a great deal of help with English issues, especially if it's not their first language, which isn't uncommon as English is the lingua franca for most subjects.

If anything's unclear in what a human author's written, we can raise queries with them and clear issues up, or if they're incompetent, we can apply common sense or our own real-world knowledge and research as best we can to get the job done. I'm not sure how that would work with an AI author. I'm not sure at all how it would work with AI copy-editors working on AI-generated text!

But the technology's been creeping in to copy-editing work for years in the form of automated "assistants" using AI (which are not infrequently more of a hindrance than a help), though so far they still need humans as the final arbiters, and maybe always will unless standards slip even more than they have already over the last few decades.

The pressures are likely to be higher in non-fiction because academics have to publish to survive nowadays, even if they sometimes have nothing new to say ("sometimes" may be a bit generous there). Plagiarism is already a major issue, and efforts to detect it have been automated to a certain extent - often using AI. Detecting AI-generated copy will pose its own challenges, and so the arms race will continue - and no doubt involve pitting AI against AI!