Kendra Ward, Page Two’s newly promoted publishing director, recently met with Page Two co-founder and co-CEO Trena White to share her thoughts on how AI is changing writing and editing.
Note: We used AI to transcribe the interview and then humans edited the transcript to a readable length, making judgments about what material was most interesting and salient to retain.
T: Book editing is a long-established craft, and we’re at a fascinating moment because of AI. So how do you see editing evolving right now?
K: On the one hand, I feel like the craft remains the craft. It’s not really changed. What has changed dramatically since the beginning of 2026 is that there seems to be much more AI use in manuscripts. Some issues that weren’t coming up very much a year ago are coming up quite a bit now.
T: How would you describe those issues?
K: I recently read two manuscripts back to back. With the first manuscript, I thought, What’s going on here? This is clearly the author’s intellectual property, but something is off with the language. It’s very perfect, very uniform. Patterns are repeating over and over. Look at all these sentence fragments and framing in the negative and “it’s not just this, it’s that.”
I went on to the next manuscript, and I saw the exact same language patterns, and the exact same kinds of issues, an overall vagueness and yet correctness with the writing.
There was no distinction in the voices between those two manuscripts. That was new.
Both situations led to deep conversations with the authors about what AI use is acceptable and what is unacceptable for publication. And I think in both cases the AI use created a lot of additional work to reinfuse the manuscript with the authors’ own voices.
For a while, we’ve been dealing with things like AI hallucinations in references and fact-checking. But now there’s the issue of how we make sure that the intellectual property is sound and belonging to the author, and then how we work to improve the language and improve the writing. And it’s very difficult to do that once a manuscript is uniformly edited by AI.
T: You recently developed our AI guidelines for authors in response, and we now require authors to disclose in advance whether and how they’ve used AI for any part of their book’s development. We don’t allow AI-generated material in our books. Still, there are many grey areas in interpreting these policies and guidelines. How do you think now about the lines between acceptable and unacceptable use in a manuscript?
K: AI is really good at formatting footnotes, being a thesaurus, transcribing interviews, things like that that are technical in nature. You still need to check everything, but it’s doing what it does best and saving you a lot of time.
T: The things that don’t require human creativity and thinking. They’re more formulaic and systematic in nature. Right now we’re thinking a lot about human voice in manuscripts. Can you imagine a time where we can’t distinguish between AI written material and genuinely human authored material?
K: Yes.
T: And then what? What is your most dystopian outlook on what generative AI means for writing?
K: Well, I see many hazards. At a recent editors’ conference, what I gleaned from one speaker was about how people are using AI to generate content on LinkedIn, email, communications of all sorts. Then everybody’s reading that writing, and so people start mimicking it, even if they’re not using AI. Then AI trains on it, and the cycle continues. It’s this infinite feedback loop we’re in deep with these not benign tools. And AI, as far as I can see at this moment, is not improving the language.
T: You mentioned the issues with AI-edited text, but do you think AI can be helpful at all for editing?
K: In an AI for editors course that I’m taking, we covered substantive editing of manuscripts, where you provide a succinct prompt and ask AI to deliver an edit. It performed that edit on a short piece of text with a fair degree of skill and precision. It was very productive and efficient, even as its output still needed human oversight and informed judgement. But I would not run that prompt before I had read and come to my own conclusions about a manuscript, because so much of the creativity and the intelligence that an editor, and a writer, brings to bear on a manuscript is that creative process of generating thought, often in response to how one feels when reading a manuscript. AI does not feel. It is not slow and quiet and meditative. But we need those qualities of being human in writing, and in the writer-editor relationship.
T: There is something to instinct, you know. How is this material going to land for a human reader?
K: I don’t think it can. But then it can do really amazing things where I might not be as strong, like pointing out what may be missing from this manuscript. It is always harder to see what’s not there. At the editor’s conference, there were people taking hardline stances: I’m not going to work on manuscripts that AI has touched. That’s not my perspective. But I am deeply interested and invested in how we learn to use AI well, and how do we educate others about how to use it well in writing and editing?
T: What would you like every author to know about using AI in their written work?
K: If you’re worried about the quality of your writing, running it all through AI to edit it, at this point, will probably not improve it and will flatten your unique voice and make it worse than if it’s full of technical errors.
T: Again we come back to this question of the degradation of writing overall. What are the qualities of a book and writing that you think will stand up to the onslaught of AI and, let’s say, stand out in this era of AI-generated content.
K: At this very moment that is likely to change, it comes back to that question of feeling. In my experience, material with heavy AI intervention does not inspire the kinds of feelings and emotions that engage readers. So what is going to emotionally appeal to readers and provoke that sense of corporeal investment in reading on?
T: And so then writing that includes stories, the author’s experience, descriptions that evoke emotion.
K: Yes, personal details and ambiguity and a bit of human messiness that we might even choose to let stand. I mean, AI will probably get better at doing all of that as well. But we shall see.
About Kendra:
Kendra Ward is the publishing director at Page Two and an editor of many nationally bestselling and award-winning books. With more than twenty years of editorial experience, she has helped entrepreneurs, executives, speakers, and thought leaders turn their expertise into books that expand their influence and advance their work.
At Page Two, Kendra has shaped the books the company publishes and the editorial approach behind them, refining the processes that guide authors from initial concept to finished manuscript. Her work combines deep editorial expertise with a practical understanding of what it takes to transform complex ideas into compelling, market-ready books.
Earlier in her career, she served as an associate editor at McClelland & Stewart and an executive editor at the Art Canada Institute. She also ran a thriving freelance editorial business whose clients included Penguin Random House Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the University of Regina Press.
Known for her editorial excellence, strategic perspective, and author-first approach, Kendra is passionate about identifying compelling ideas, helping authors sharpen their message, and bringing ambitious projects to life.