Ethical Disclosure Is Required

There seems to be a growing trend of "ai" services not disclosing their chatbot use.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Whether you read (or believe) Ed Zitron’s coverage of “ai” as a current problem, you’re probably sick of hearing about terminally online people (like me) talking about it—for or against. Sorry. 😞 If you’re not my client and never plan to be, you can probably skip this one in which I pontificate about the wonders of human storytellers.

💖 There is an announcement of shiny new educational opportunity for human storytellers below, too, if you’re interested in getting feedback on your writing from, you know, a human. 💪

TL;DR: I do not use and will never use “ai” to generate feedback for any student or client of mine about their writing or to produce any of my own books or ghostwritten books. Full stop. 🛑

Goodbye, Story Grid.

Rumor has it that I will be “fired” by Story Grid at the end of June…without the 60-day notice that is required by my “contract.” Because I am no longer treated like an insider, I can only speculate about how one 62-year-old man is going to provide personalized feedback for over 100 students in the Writer Mentorship Program after all of the mentors are summarily unplugged by Tim Grahl without the contractually required notice or personal communication…without using “ai” to do it.

🦾 However, neither Tim nor Shawn are disclosing to prospective students that the WMP will be entirely machine-graded going forward. I guess Shawn drank his own Mentoring the Machines Kool-Aid™ and has “coded” his own Little Shawn Machine.

More than half of the mentors have already resigned due to maltreatment by Shawn Coyne (receipts and recordings exist and are available upon request), including the former director of the Writer Mentorship Program and the Scene Writing Workshop, the lovely and talented Julia Blair.

For over two years, it has been my honor to teach and mentors dozens of students and aspiring writers as part of both of the previously human-led and human-taught programs. You human writers rock! 🤘

I hope you’ll stick around here and kibitz with me about story stuff. Humans wrote amazing books long before Story Grid and we humans will continue to write amazing books long after Story Grid.

Editor vs. Predator

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Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Hello, Scene Stormers!

Beginning in September 2026, a few of us (human mentors) will begin teaching a six-week scene writing bootcamp that we are affectionately branding as Scene Stormers. We will be discussing the well-known fundamentals of fiction writing that all the cool kids since Aristotle first wrote down that stories need a beginning, a muddle (my term), and an end in The Poetics and we will be giving you human-generated feedback on your scenes.

We (Scene Stormers) are currently assembling our curriculum and we will be publishing it all in advance, because (Spoiler Alert! ⚠️) there are no secrets in storytelling. The primary value that we provide to you (our customers) is the weekly discussions during the six-week bootcamp and the one-on-one human feedback on your writing every week.

📅 If you’d like to be invited to our inaugural bootcamp in September, sign up now.

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The Book Shaman “ai” Pledge

I will not now nor ever in the future use an LLM or other generative-”ai” service to evaluate, train, or otherwise provide feedback to a client or student based upon their writing. Anyone who operates under my brand and trademark (Book Shaman) will only provide human advice through the application of hard-earned human skill to provide humans with actionable feedback on their writing.

What do I use?

Full Disclosure: I currently use Zoom, which has an “ai” assistant which can produce transcripts of meetings with you. I will happily turn off the “ai” assistant if you would rather. I only record meetings if YOU want me to. Some “ai” can be useful, if you treat it like normal technology (which it is).

From time to time, I do ask Claude research questions (or CMOS rule clarifications and grammatical confusion) in the process of developing my own stories. I no longer use ChatGPT (long story). I accidentally use Gemini or Copilot once in a while when I search Google or Bing. I have never used and I intend to never use Grok. I vaguely recall that Meta has one or more models, but I can’t even remember what they’re called and I’d never use them, either. But I don’t use and will never use any of them to generate words that will find their way into my books (or your books).

More often, I use Claude Code to generate bits for my Sekret Skwirrel Software Project™. Over the past six months, it’s actually become more of a running argument with Claude Code than a collaboration, though. I didn’t expect the enshittification to happen so soon, but I suspect that Anthropic (like the rest of the unprofitable “ai” bros) keeps trying to find a more efficient model that’s less-good and more-wrong. Hum to the tune of Sad but True. 🎶

Why do I put “ai” in quotes?

Over the past thirty-five years of my career in software, I have become deeply acquainted with so-called machine learning and “ai” which I do find to be as artificial as fuck and not-at-all intelligent. I (briefly) worked in Amazon’s fab-less silicon subsidiary (Annapurna Labs) as a software engineering manager. My team was (still is—but they’re not my team anymore) responsible for the hardware testing of machine learning accelerators (often mistakenly called GPUs) for all of AWS.

I understand LLMs (transformer-type models), accelerated learning models, classifiers, and many other types of models quite well professionally. I “grok” (if you’ll pardon the pun) how they work on a deep, technical level. It is my considered opinion that the current state and foreseeable future of the “ai” technology cannot achieve “G” let alone “I” and we’re not in danger of Skynet becoming AGI. We cannot even define “G” or “I” in a satisfactory manner for humans, let alone chatbots or “agents.” 🙄

🤓 If you’d like to read (or listen to 🎧) a very approachable debunking of the “ai” hype cycle and mythology, I strongly recommend Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever. You’ll sleep easier at night and will be less likely to buy goofy new IPO stocks before the “ai” bubble pops.

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Would you like help from a human?

Do you want a novel or do you want to be a novelist? I can help you with either. (Yes, I am willing to ghostwrite your book if you’d rather describe the story you want and pay me to do the hard work of producing the words. I promise that no “ai” will be used.)

I’m here if you need me (for story stuff). You are my full-time job now. Let’s chat about how I can help you write the book of your dreams.

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⭐️ I did announce the big (for me) preorder, but in case you missed it:

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