The History Only He Can Write

Cedar Valley News
June 5, 2026
The History Only He Can Write
By Dan Larson

A man in my ward came to see me last week with a cardboard box on his lap. Inside were letters, a few photographs gone soft at the corners, and a yellow legal pad covered in his own slow handwriting, the letters falling away at the ends of the words as a hand does after seventy. He is writing his personal history for his grandchildren, and he had a question. It was not the one I expected.

“Could the computer write this for me?” he asked. He had tried one of the new programs. He fed it a few facts — where he was born, the names of his parents, the year he came home from the service — and the screen handed back three clean paragraphs. They were better than his, he said. His own sentences came out crooked. The machine’s came out straight.

I had a speech on my mind all week. In Athens, in the shadow of the Acropolis, Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles spoke to a room of faith leaders and engineers about artificial intelligence. A day earlier, in Rome, Pope Leo XIV had said much the same. Two of the oldest traditions, agreeing inside a single day, about the newest tool in it.

Elder Gong did not tell the room to fear the tool. He called it a gift of possibility. Then he said the line I have carried since: “We will not reach our full human potential until we, and not any technology, take responsibility to chart our best future.” The compass cannot come from the machine. It comes only from us.

He brought research with him. Most people, asked a hard question about right and wrong, expect a religious answer among the answers. Nearly every AI model leaves religion out. The engineers did not set out to erase faith. They simply did not think to put it in. A tool built without a soul will hand you back a world without one, and do it in clean sentences.

I thought again about the man with the box. The machine’s paragraphs were straighter than his. He was right about the prose. He was wrong about what his grandchildren need.

Our scriptures are personal histories. David wrote his own life by hand — his fear, his guilt, the nights he lay awake — and never cleaned it up. “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.” He does not hide the fear. He writes it true. Three thousand years later, we read him — not for tidy words, but because they are his. No one else could bear his witness. No one else was there.

I told the man the machine could help him. It can fix his spelling. It can order his dates and find the year he has forgotten. Use it for all of it. But the witness is yours.

He pushed back. His hand shakes now, he said. The words come out wrong, and some mornings the page beats him before he begins. The program never tires and never misspells. Why not let it carry the load? I knew the question. It is the same one I ask before a talk I do not feel ready to give.

The machine can carry the spelling. It cannot carry the fear. When you write “I was afraid,” the program can make the sentence prettier. It cannot be the one who was afraid. It was not there. It has never been anywhere. A personal history is not a record of facts. It is a person saying, in his own hand, this happened to me, and here is what it meant.

The grandchildren will not read it for the prose. They will read it to hear him — the crooked sentences, the things he kept and the things he let go, the witness only he can give. A day will come when the box is all they have of him. The straight paragraphs would be worth nothing then. The crooked ones will be worth everything.

I gave him back his legal pad. I asked him to write the next line himself.

Write it crooked. Write it true.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. If you are keeping a record for the ones who come after you — by hand, by machine, or not yet at all — I would like to hear how you decide what to keep. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Elder Gerrit W. Gong, the Athens Summit on AI Ethics, Pope Leo XIV, and the Consortium for Evaluation of Faith and Ethics in AI referenced in this editorial are real.

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