Let A.I. be the Tool, not the Author
Since AI models such as ChatGPT have boomed in popularity over recent years, many have questioned whether AI could eventually replace writers and historians. While some are impressed with AI’s capabilities and are optimistic for the future, others, especially authors, are worried for their role in the writing industry. AI cannot replace human writers; rather, it should stay in the background as a helpful tool, enhancing, not overriding, human thinking.
Although artificial intelligence had been in development for several decades, people only started to consider it as an alternative to human writing in the early 2020s. When ChatGPT was officially released on November 30, 2022, the application amassed over a million users in the first five days after its launch. People were amazed at how the AI could spout out essays and articles with astonishing quality, and the opportunity to save countless hours of work appealed many. Now, the application has hundreds of millions of weekly users, with engineers and data scientists still updating the software regularly.
However, AI will not take over writing and become the one behind the pen. Even with apps such as NotebookLM, which let you choose the AI’s source material, inaccuracies in results are still relatively common, as the AI cannot determine what is fact or fake. In fact, on a benchmark test, OpenAI’s new o3 model provided fake information 33% of the time.
AI belongs in a supporting role, rather than the author. Often, AI can act as a source of feedback, which you can then decide whether or not to apply to your writing. Fred Turner, a teacher in the communication department of Stanford, was asked how AI has helped him in his recent book project. He stated that when he showed ChatGPT his work, “it was almost as though I got to take the book to market and stand in the bookstore and hold it up in front of a whole bunch of interested but nonspecialist readers and have them tell me what was working for them and what wasn’t.”
One of AI’s specialties is its ability to generate a structure for a given topic. For instance, writers can use AI to generate an outline and structure for a research paper, with the historian making the connections between certain events, places, and people. This approach demonstrates how AI can help enhance writing while continuing to retain human creativity. The AI is acting as a colleague or mentor, giving the writer some guidelines to improve their paper.
On the other hand, experts state that AI could reach human-level intelligence in the next few years. However, an AI’s intelligence does not necessarily correspond to how natural-sounding its responses are. AI writing often sounds clunky and awkward and fails to capture readers’ emotions effectively. While this issue sounds like it only regards creative writing, historical writing and other non-fiction works are not simply just regurgitating information. Historians have become capable of drawing their own connections and have published their own theories on certain events in history.
So, don’t fret over what is to come for the future of writing. Rather than fearing AI, focus on how to adapt it to meet your needs, allowing it to complement your writing instead of competing with it.
Articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/magazine/ai-history-historians-scholarship.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/30/chatgpts-one-year-anniversary-how-the-viral-ai-chatbot-has-changed.html
