Hey writers! Let’s clear up a massive misconception. We tend to talk about AI like it's some alien "black box" that woke up one day to write our novels.

Tech pioneer Jaron Lanier has a brilliantly grounding take on this:

“Stop treating AI like a god. It is simply a collection of people.”

When you strip away the sci-fi, it completely changes how we use AI to craft our stories.

It’s Not Thinking, It’s Math

AI doesn't possess an imagination. When you ask it to draft a chapter, it’s using a process called inference.

It pulls from a massive database using mathematical embeddings and weights to predict the next word based on billions of human texts. There’s no magic in the box, the magic is us. When AI writes, it’s just humanity's collective voice echoing back.

The Student and the Great Masters

Think about how you learned to write. You read the Great Masters, absorbed their pacing and world-building, and synthesized those styles into your own voice.

AI is doing the exact same thing, just at an industrial scale. It "read" everything and synthesizes patterns based on your prompts.

But what about the original authors? Lanier rightfully points out that tech giants built fortunes without paying the creators who trained the AI. It’s a vital conversation, but consider this: when a student checks a book out of the library and learns from its prose, they don't pay the author a royalty for their "training." Learning from existing work is how storytelling culture has always functioned.

You Still Bring the Soul

When you stop seeing AI as an alien intelligence and start seeing it as a massive digital library of human thought, it becomes the ultimate sounding board. You aren't outsourcing your creativity. You are collaborating with a mathematical reflection of every storyteller who came before you.

The machine doesn't have a soul to put into your story. That part is entirely up to you. Open up your work in progress, fire up your AI co-writer, and tap into the collective library.

Happy writing!

Links

There Is No AI, Really (It’s Just People), with Jaron Lanier