I grew up in a house filled with books. My dad dabbled in community theatre, and from a young age, I was surrounded by stories.
To me, writing always felt human. Messy, electric, alive. That’s why, the first time I watched an AI churn out a full article in seconds, I felt a mix of awe and dread.
Writing is a skill. It takes effort. That’s why I spend my time training people to communicate better. But here was a machine, generating polished text in less time than it takes a knife to split an apple.
And it made me think of Roald Dahl’s The Great Automatic Grammatizator.
This mostly-forgotten satire is just 14 pages long. Yet it eerily predicted the rise of AI-generated writing from all the way back in 1953.
It tells the story of a machine that can mass-produce novels, articles, and stories better and faster than humans.
A quick plot summary
Dahl tells the tale of a young engineer, Adolph Knipe, who stumbles on a realisation:
“English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!
Therefore, an engine built along the lines of the electric computer could be adjusted to arrange words in their right order. Feed it with plots and leave it to write the sentences.”
So Knipe sets out to build this machine. His room disappears under mountains of notes – lists of words, plots, names yanked from phone books. After two weeks he emerges and unveils a strange electric typewriter.
With the press of a few buttons, it can hammer out a five-thousand-word story in thirty seconds.
Knipe quickly finds that when you can write at that speed, you can dominate the market. And much like Rockfeller in the early American oil boom, Knipe has his competitors:
- sign an exclusive contract to never write another word; and
- let the machine use their names for its own stuff.
One by one, the authors – pressured by financial insecurity – begin to cave. Until eventually, nearly every published story comes from the machine.
The story ends (spoilers) with a gut-punch, as the narrator reveals:
“As I sit here listening to the howling of my nine starving children in the other room, I can feel my own hand creeping closer and closer to that golden contract… Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve.”
The machines have arrived
Dahl’s machine is no longer fiction. Large Language Models like ChatGPT are inching closer to it every day.
For years, we told ourselves all machines could ever do was crunch numbers, sort data and beat Garry Kasparov at chess.
Creativity? That was ours.
Then AI started writing.
At first, the words were clunky. Like a man writing a woman, where she can’t just walk into a room, no, he’s gotta describe the way her “hips sway” with each step.
Today, this awkwardness is (mostly) gone. AI can write fluently, adapt to different styles, and mimic voices like a robotic lyrebird.
Punch in a few prompts and these models can:
- Write full articles in 30 seconds (this one took me a lot longer, even with AI as a proofreader).
- Craft marketing copy (brands are already using it for ads and social media).
- Create entire books (there’s a whole pile of them already sitting on Amazon).
The speed is staggering. A human writer will spend a winter of endless nights to churn out a book. AI can knock one out before breakfast with a thousand variations by nightfall.
This is the choice we’ve made
In The Great Automatic Grammatizator, writers were forced by fear of starvation to sign over their names. In real life, we’re volunteering our creativity for convenience.
In Australia, 44% of adults read at literacy level 1 to 2 (a low level).
And if reading is hard, writing is even harder. There is pain involved in writing – to find the right words, to get a sentence just so. I fully admit to running parts of this very article through AI to shave off some of this pain.
The pain isn’t only in the writing itself – it’s in getting started. Even people who enjoy writing know the feeling of “writer’s block.” It’s a problem that seems unique to creative work, as the old saying goes:
“Plumbers don’t get plumbers block. Lawyers don’t get lawyers block.”
AI makes all of that effortless. If you can get a polished article, email, or policy document in minutes instead of hours, why not take the shortcut?
Why AI still needs humans (for now)
In the Great Automatic Grammatizator the machine makes publishing easy and cheap. There’s no advances to pay, no writer egos, no missed deadlines.
But none of that means better stories.
AI can write. No question. It can string words together with mechanical precision, summon poetry on command, and spit out op-eds that tick all the logical boxes.
But something is missing. It’s not quality, because AI can mimic quality. It’s not even intelligence, because AI can arrange ideas with eerie competence.
It’s purpose. It’s easy to see great writing as stacking words like neatly folded towels. But we need to look inside the words for:
- Perspective – The scars and stories of lived experience. The hard-won insights.
- Emotion – Writing that makes you feel something, because the person writing it felt something too.
- Voice – Not just a style, but a human presence, whispering between the lines.
Right now, AI writing is a little-too-perfect replica of the real thing. It misses the contradictions, the sidetracks, the vulnerability, and the whiplash of real writing.
One fact I’ve learned through my time as an improviser is that some of the best scenes you’ll do come from moments of mistake. Flubbed lines, audience heckles, bad listening. Blurting out the thing that lives at the back of your mind that you usually lock away.
This is what AI misses. It’s like a metronome. It keeps flawless time, but never actually feels the music.
- AI can generate poetry, but it doesn’t ache.
- AI can write an opinion piece, but it doesn’t rage or rejoice in that opinion.
- AI can tell a joke, but it doesn’t find things funny.
Despite Dahl’s warning, I have a soft spot for AI. I think it’s immensely powerful. But (for now) the best results don’t come from AI alone. They come from real humans with real ideas who refine and inject meaning where none was before.
But what is next for AI writing
This raises some messy questions.
It used to be simple: if you wrote something, it was yours. Good, bad, embarrassing, or brilliant, it didn’t matter. If the ideas, structure, and words were yours, so was the work.
But now, you can feed a prompt into a blinking box, and out comes a gift-wrapped novel – is it yours?
What does it mean to own a piece of writing today? If AI just cleaned up your grammar, does that make it any less your work? We don’t strip an author’s name from a novel because they used spell check – is AI any different?
The law says an AI can’t own what it writes. So if you give a machine a prompt, much like if you give a monkey a camera, you don’t own the copyright. But does that mean no one owns it? Is it free for anyone to use?
What happens when:
- A newspaper lets AI write the news and the public doesn’t blink.
- A publisher prints a book written by code, and the critics line up to call it genius.
- A filmmaker pieces together an AI-scripted film and still collects the award.
And what happens to human writers when AI can do the same job at a fraction of the time and cost?
- Do journalists become fact-checkers instead of storytellers?
- Do novelists become ‘AI directors,’ curating rather than creating?
- Does writing stop being a profession and become a hobby?
When we face the Great Automatic Grammatizator, do we sign the contract, pack up our pens and let the machines take over? Or, like so many things in the future, is it simply too soon to know?
A bold prediction on the future of AI
AI writing is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean the end of human storytelling. It means a shift.
Writers who use AI as a tool will find success. AI can speed up research, ideas, and even drafting, but it won’t replace the impulse to tell stories and talk about things that matter.
Dahl’s The Great Automatic Grammatizator predicted a world where the machine did the work and credited it to the humans. But for now, the best work still needs a human hand.
And even when it inevitably scoops at the entirety of recorded human experience, it still won’t have access to you and your perspective. So keep writing. AI can imitate. It can generate. But it can’t be you. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
