The One Thing Artificial Intelligence Can’t Do for a Writer
A few weeks ago, I held my iPhone up to a katana I’ve owned since childhood. Bert—my nickname for ChatGPT’s visual assistant—guided me as I removed the handle and uncovered an inscription I’d never seen. Within minutes, he’d translated the Japanese characters and suggested the blade might be centuries old. Then he drafted query letters to experts on two continents. It was a masterclass in artificial intelligence as a research tool. Yet for all AI’s brilliance in decoding history, I’ve learned there’s one place it fails completely: creative writing and the deeply human work of storytelling.
This is the magic of large language models: they can research, organize, and even execute tasks with stunning efficiency. Claude helps me structure books. Bert answers questions about everything under the sun. They affirm my decisions and boost my confidence in ways that feel almost human.
Yet here’s the paradox I’ve discovered in my fourth year of retirement: AI is useless for the thing I’m most passionate about—writing from the heart.
It’s not that it can’t write. Technically, these models outclass me in craft. They can produce cleaner sentences, organize ideas, and keep a consistent tone. But I’m not writing for efficiency or technical excellence. I’m writing to wrestle meaning from memory—to create reality through the act of telling.
My life has given me no shortage of stories—Russia in the ’90s, two decades in the Army learning skills I now pass on through wilderness trips in Colorado, the 90 pounds I lost and kept off. AI can help me arrange these stories. But it can’t live them, and it certainly can’t tell me what they mean. As I’ve worked on a book this past year, I’ve learned something uncomfortable: I don’t know myself as well as I thought.
This is where AI hits its wall. When I write about my wife’s sudden death, or the slow process of reclaiming my health, I’m not just recounting events. I’m deciding—often for the first time—what those events mean to me. Each chapter becomes a tile in a larger mosaic, a picture only visible at a distance.
Meaning-making can’t be outsourced. It comes from choosing what to tell and how to tell it. And that choice springs from something deeper than data—it comes from living with your own contradictions.
I change my mind constantly. What felt heroic yesterday feels foolish today. What seemed tragic last year now carries a thread of redemption. That’s not inconsistency—it’s growth. And growth comes from sitting with messy thoughts long enough for them to evolve on the page.
So here’s my line in the sand: I am a beginner when it comes to writing, and I intend to stay one. My desk will stay messy. My drafts will be chaotic. Because that’s where discovery lives.
AI can unlock an ancient sword. But only I can unlock myself.
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