This really resonated for me. I work in academia in a STEM field in Japan. For the first decade or so, I was always happy to help people who were struggling with writing a paper in English, and gradually developed a reputation for being the guy who could "get you published" in Nature, Science, Cell Press etc. But I ran into the problem of the limitless demand for this kind of editorial work (due to the massive pressure to publish and the generally poor English ability of many scientists in Japan). It got to the point where I didn't want to meet people because I knew the conversation would turn to whether I could help them, or theur friend, or a grad student, fix a manuscript. Finally I just told everyone who asked that I had to stop for health reasons, and my life is so much better now. I had worried that this might cost me some friends, but it made me realize that the only friendships it cost were ones based on them asking me to do unpleasant work for free.
You're both right - I did make quite a bit copy-editing for some minor journals published by Japanese scientific societies. But I also experimented a bit last year with using ChatGPT to correct minor spelling and grammatical errors, and it did a credible job. With the right ptompts, you can even get it to do a line by line explanation of the logic behind each of its edits, so it could probably serve as a free, instant and personalized writing tutor as well. I guess its especially well-suited to highly formalized writing styles like those used in research articles.
I'm a professor in a non-STEM field in the U.S. Even if we put foreign-language issues aside, it's surprising to see how much this screenwriter's experiences carry over into academia.
