An AI copy editor should do the passes a person keeps skipping.

Edit in the wrong order and you re-do work. Fix the claims first, then the structure, then the sentences, then the words. Each pass depends on the one above it being settled.

Editing prose before verifying claims produces a beautifully written inaccuracy. Restructuring after line editing means throwing away the lines. The cheap sequence is always facts, then shape, then language.

The automated checker belongs at the start of that sequence, because most of what it finds is cheap to fix and expensive to discover later.

A browser-based checker can count things and match patterns, and that covers more editing work than people expect.

Whether the argument holds. A paragraph can be clean, sourced and structurally sound while supporting the wrong conclusion, and no rule detects that.

Whether the tone is right for the moment. The same sentence is warm in one campaign and tone-deaf in the next, and the difference lives outside the document.

Whether the piece should exist. Generated drafts often answer a brief that was wrong, and the most valuable edit is to say so before anyone polishes it.

Cut one sentence per paragraph to four or five words. Let another run long. Delete the transition that announces what the next paragraph will do, and the sentence after it usually gets stronger.

Replace the abstract noun with the thing it stands for: not a solution but a cache, not a challenge but a queue that fills during the morning peak. Specifics are the hardest part for a model to invent and the easiest part for a reader to trust.

Then read the first sentence of every section aloud. If they all have the same shape, the structure is doing the work of the content.

Every publication has conventions: spelling, capitalisation, how products are named, which claims require a footnote, whether the tone allows contractions.

Write them down as rules with examples, and check them mechanically where possible. A style guide nobody can apply under deadline is a document, not a standard.

Where the automated pass disagrees with house style, the house style wins, and that disagreement should be recorded so the next editor inherits the decision.

For copy that carries regulated claims, contractual language or a company byline, the final pass belongs to a named editor who signs the scope they covered.

They should start from the automated report: it tells them what has already been checked so their attention goes to the claims and the argument rather than to a spot-check for placeholders.

Both artefacts then travel with the piece: the deterministic pass and the signed edit.