Why Galley Will Never Put AI in Your Prose
Galley's smart tools count and check (overused words, name consistency, margins) but they never write, rewrite, suggest, or train on your prose. That's a line, not a to-do. When software can 'improve' your sentences, your voice drifts toward the model's, your book becomes someone's training data, and authorship gets murky. Galley keeps every word yours, on purpose and permanently.
Every writing tool is racing to shove AI into your draft. Galley is going the other way, deliberately. It’s a line in the philosophy, not a roadmap gap, and it’s the decision I’m most sure about in the whole product.
What Galley’s tools actually do
They count and check. That’s it.
- Overused words per thousand, so you can see the crutch you lean on, located by chapter.
- The one misspelled character name sitting among the correct ones.
- Margins, page counts, KDP preflight against the store’s rules.
Notice what’s missing: none of these write a sentence, rewrite a sentence, or suggest a “better” one. They hand you information and get out of the way. The writing stays yours because the software never touches it.
Why the line is absolute
Three reasons, and they’re the whole argument.
Your voice drifts toward the model. The moment a tool offers to “improve” your sentence, you start accepting the smoother, blander, 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, not like you. Your voice is the one thing a reader can’t get anywhere else, and it’s the first casualty of assisted writing.
Your manuscript becomes training data. Most AI writing features send your words to a server, and a lot of them reserve the right to train on what you send. Your unpublished novel, the thing you haven’t even sold yet, quietly becomes someone else’s dataset. Hard no.
Authorship gets murky. If a model wrote a third of your sentences, who wrote the book? That’s not a fun philosophy-seminar question when it’s your name on the cover and, increasingly, when a store asks you to disclose AI use. The cleanest answer is the true one: you wrote all of it.
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.