Who's really writing your stories?

nospam@example.com (David A. Wimsett) — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:25:00 +0000

There have been tools on the market to assist with the story telling process. Before writing was invented, tales were memorized and presented aurally by poets and bards who could recite tens of thousands of words. When writing was developed, stories could be written on papyrus, animal hides, stone columns and clay tablets. This was a major advancement in recording ideas for future generations, high tech for the time.

Charles Dickens wrote every book with a quill pen on paper. Those were, once more, breakthroughs in technology.

With the advent of the typewriter, authors began to create stories at a keyboard. Audio recording equipment allowed the option to dictate books and have someone else type it up. Word processors added the ability to easily make edits and corrections, store files electronically, print them and later transmit them electrically to agents and publishers.

Word processors also offered spell checking. At first, this was a file with a list of words the program would compare against a manuscript. Any words not in the electronic list were flagged and the author had to make corrections manually. Grammar checkers were added to catch double words, mismatches in tense and other simple problems. Later advancements presented possible replacement words, yet it was always up to the author to make the corrections or ignore the warning if they didn’t match their style.

Technology has enhanced the ability of authors to share concepts in more efficient ways.

With the widespread acceptance of the personal computer, other tools appeared that didn’t just flag possible errors in spelling and grammar, they corrected them automatically. These offered a teaching opportunity. Writers could see examples of how to improve their communication and employ these lessons in future work.

They also carried disadvantages. People can continue to write poorly and rely on these tools to fix errors. As in any profession, practitioners must learn the craft by heart and take off the training wheels.

It is in the act of writing where we form our ideas, concepts, arguments, observations and have the opportunity to explore subjects to understand them more fully. In some cases we may change our own perceptions as we discover new facts and consider previously held convictions.

Good writing doesn’t require a degree in English. Everyone can learn how to write well with some instruction and reference material. A great resource for clear writing is Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. This little book of and writing style.

Today, a new tool gives great promise and carries a dangerous threat; artificial intelligence, AI. When people use it to write sentences, paragraphs or whole books, the words produced are not the authors. They are drawn from a massive database of written material drawn from Internet posts and published works taken by AI companies, often with no compensation to the creators.

AI can also lead to the homogenization of text where every report, every resume every university entrance letter and every story fall into a predictable format so there is no distinction.
Writing is art, be ita work of fiction, nonfiction, business report or proposal. Art is the expression of the human soul, not in a religious sense, but as it expresses the essence of what it is to be human. In art, creators share themselves with others and help bind communities together.

AI produced materiel does none of this. The large language models (LLM) don’t think. They have no consciousness. They are computer programs that use sophisticated neural network feedback to draw stored data points and guess the most probable word in a sentence given the billions of examples fed into it.

These answers are not hard wired. The neural network design and programs that run them scan the databases and make a guess as to the next word. Humans from around the world, mainly in third world countries where they earn $1 a day, check the answers and mark it correct or incorrect. The computer then seals off incorrect neural network pathways and reinforces correct ones until the AI is trained to select the answer with the highest chance of being correct. How correct? Astrophysicist Niel deGrasse Tyson, director the Hayden Planetarium in New York, asked AI a set of question he already knew the answers to. The machine gave the wrong answer 20% of the time because it always has to respond with something. By design. AI can’t return, “I don’t know.”

Even when correct, a major problem with asking AI to provide an answer is you get a result, but because you didn’t work through the steps to arrive at the answer, you don’t really know what it means because the underlying reasoning is missing. As such, you will find it difficult to extrapolate on the answer to apply it on future questions without asking AI again, perpetuating the trap.

There are people using AI to create entire books they upload to Amazon. They may think they’ll make a lot of money, few self published authors do, or want to pretend they’re authors, but they didn’t write the books and can claim neither ownership nor copyright. This devalues actual books and floods the market, making it difficult for readers to discover actual books.

I challenge you to be a true writers. Don’t use AI or lean on writing tools that correct your work so they become crutches. Learn the skills and practice them. Put the time into thinking about who your characters are and where the story is going. Express your observations, opinions and emotions in prose you create.

Create art as the expression of your humanity to share with the world and bind us together. This is the true power of writing.

David A. Wimsett's Perspectives - Craft

Who's really writing your stories?