Why Galley Will Never Put AI in Your Prose
Galley's tools count and check (overused words, name consistency, page counts), but nothing in it writes, rewrites, suggests or finishes a sentence, and your book isn't used to train any model. That's a decision, not a gap in the roadmap. When software offers to improve your sentences, your voice drifts towards the model's, your book can become someone's training data, and it gets harder to say who wrote it.
Most writing tools are adding AI to the draft as fast as they can. Galley isn’t, on purpose. It’s on the philosophy page, it’s not on the roadmap, and it’s the decision I’m most sure of in the whole product.
What Galley’s tools do
They count and check, and that’s all.
- Overused words counts the words you lean on, per thousand, and shows which chapter uses each one most.
- Name consistency finds the one misspelled character name among the right ones.
- KDP preflight checks the page count, the cover and the listing details against Amazon’s rules.
None of them write a sentence, rewrite one, or suggest a “better” one. They give you information and you decide what to do with it. They’re ordinary code, so they give the same answer every time you run them. The revision page has the full list.
Why I won’t add it
Your voice drifts towards the model. As soon as a tool offers to improve a sentence, you start accepting the smoother, more average version, because it’s right there and it’s easy. Do that for 90,000 words and the book sounds like the model. Your voice is the one thing a reader can’t get anywhere else.
Your manuscript can become training data. Most AI writing features send your words to someone’s server, and some reserve the right to train on what you send. Your unpublished novel, the thing you haven’t even sold yet, ends up in someone else’s dataset. There’s a longer post on whether your writing is being used to train AI, with how to check the tools you use.
It gets harder to say who wrote it. If a model wrote a third of your sentences, who wrote the book? That matters when it’s your name on the cover, and more and more when a store or a publisher asks you to say whether AI was involved. The simplest answer is the true one: you wrote all of it.
What that means in practice
Nothing in Galley generates text. There’s no “AI edit”, no autocomplete, no summary of your chapter, no chatbot in the sidebar. Your manuscript isn’t used to train any model, including anything of mine, and it isn’t shared or sold. The spellcheck is your browser’s own dictionary, so your words aren’t sent anywhere to be checked.
Your operating system might still add its own writing tools to every text box on your computer, Galley’s included (Apple Intelligence on a Mac does this). You can turn those off, and does Scrivener use AI has the steps. And if you do want an AI writing partner, the Sudowrite comparison is honest about what it does that Galley never will.
More on galley
- Galley for Self-PublishingWhat self-publishing a novel in Galley involves: a print-ready interior PDF, a valid EPUB, a tuned file per store, and two checks that run before you upload to KDP.
- Galley for Traditional PublishingQuerying agents or working with an editor: standard manuscript format, the submission package, watermarked beta drafts, and getting an editor's Word comments back where they belong.
- Is Your Writing Being Used to Train AI?How to find out what your writing app is allowed to do with your manuscript: the licence grant, the improve-our-services clause, the sub-processor list, and what no hosted tool can honestly promise.