AI copy editing crapping?

"Evolution journal editors resign en masse to protest Elsevier changes", Retraction Watch 12/27/2024:

All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.” […]

Among other moves, according to the statement, Elsevier “eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor,” which they interpreted as saying “editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.” The editors say the publisher “frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript:”

"In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage."

The whole resignation statement is here.

In the scholarly publishing industry, the fact that human copy-editors are not domain experts means that they sometimes make contextually inappropriate changes that authors and content editors need to fix.

But removing all capital letters and italics? How in the world did Elsevier's AI copy-editing system learn to do that? Maybe it was trained on a large volume of material that had been monocased and de-formatted — which is the right input for learning word-sequence patterns or word frequency statistics, but absolutely the wrong input for learning to copy-edit a scientific journal.

This is not totally implausible. Among its other business, Elsevier sells "Language Editing Services" (traditionally based on human "editors"), where pure word-sequence information might be part of an appropriate path to LLM-based automation. So maybe some ignorant Elsevier middle manager seized an opportunity to re-apply technology across branches of their empire?

The Retraction Watch article notes that "The mass resignation is the 20th such episode since early 2023, according to our records", though this is the first complaint I've seen about the imposition of AI copy-editing.

The business model of publishers like Elsevier has been under attack for years from many directions, as documented in "Unbundling Profile: MIT Libraries" and the associated commentary by Cory Doctorow, "MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier". (See also this 2015 LLOG post by Eric Baković and Kai von Fintel, about editorial resignations at another Elsevier journal.) As a result, publishers are exploring many legal, technical, and social alternatives, and perhaps imposing this AI copy-crapper was one of them.