Page 16: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (November 2025)

Back to the Drawing Board

AI is Useful, but it will not be Brilliant

By Rik van Hemmen is here to stay. Those who don’t explore its but were forced to play with a bad hand. Ignoring that is as use and capabilities may soon ? nd them- misguided as claiming that Jews were “unsophisticated” dur- selves left at the dock. At our company, we ing the Holocaust if the Nazis had controlled the narrative.

AI treat AI like any other engineering tool — In my stories, I try to show Lenape sophistication through no different than ? nite element analysis or computerized per- their ability to resolve complex issues in trade negotiations, formance prediction. When used well, it’s extremely useful. language, mathematics, and their appreciation for new tech-

When used poorly, it’s useless. At that level, we don’t worry nologies. One chapter, for instance, includes a Lenape man about “intelligence.” It’s more like a ? uffy Wikipedia, which, learning to sail a European-style boat.

by the way, remains a surprisingly solid source of hard techni- After my success with ChatGPT on the OPA90 article, I cal information. decided to run one of these chapters through it for a light read-

Early on, I asked AI to list the causes of slip and fall inci- ability edit. It was an unmitigated disaster. ChatGPT ? lled the dents on stairs. (I purposely avoided the marine term “lad- text with ? orid, emotional language and stripped out the long ders” to keep it simple.) It produced a neat list which was trade discussions. My careful account of a Lenape learning not particularly innovative, with a few items slightly off, but to sail was reduced to: “After some instruction, he quickly with one entry that made me pause and think, “Hmm, I ought learned to sail.” to remember that one.” In that sense, AI works as a kind of In other words, it deleted the entire purpose of the story.

global bookkeeper, keeping score on the world’s collective I tried to coax it back — locking sections, issuing strict in- knowledge. structions — but the story kept collapsing. This was my ? rst

Recently, I wrote an article for the OPA90 Forum newslet- real encounter with AI’s limits. ChatGPT recognized the text ter. It turned out to be too long, and instead of bothering me as “historical ? ction” and pulled sentence patterns from thou- to shorten it, the editor asked ChatGPT to cut it from 1,000 to sands of similar works online. It learned that most historical 500 words. He touched it up and sent it back. To my surprise, ? ction avoids lengthy technical or trade discussions — so it the message was still mostly intact, but it certainly wasn’t in deleted them, chasing the average reader’s attention span.

my voice. That may be ? ne for producing more readable stories, but

So, I decided to ask ChatGPT to rewrite the edited version it completely destroyed my intent to shift the way we think in the style of Rik van Hemmen. Because I’ve littered the in- about Native American history.

ternet with enough of my writing, it recognized my style and If I had accepted ChatGPT’s edits, I would have joined the came back with something that was 99% accurate. It looked mass of generic historical ? ction out there. Instead, I chose and felt like me, which was both impressive and a little unset- to stay the course, trusting my judgment, and maybe leaving tling. behind enough of my own writing that, someday, AI will learn

Over the past few years, I’ve also been writing historical not to delete the trade and sailing discussions.

? ction about the settlement of eastern Monmouth County, In the end, AI is very good at producing average noise. It’s

New Jersey. The stories are posted slowly on www.vanhem- far weaker at developing novel ideas without human guid- men.us. They’re written in the James Michener style, histori- ance. It re? ects the old joke about democracy: the ? awed as- cally grounded but populated with ? ctional characters. Fiction sumption that more than 50% of the time, more than 50% of allows an author to explore the human dynamics behind the people are right.

history, the context that pure historical analysis often misses Innovation, truth, and insight still demand persistent human simply because no one wrote it down at the time. effort — and I’ll bet they always will.

The early chapters explore the encounter between Euro- pean settlers and the Lenape people. The historical record,

For every column I write, Maritime Reporter &

Engineering News makes a small contribution to an written by Europeans, naturally carries a European bias. Na- organization of my choice. I nominate the Nanticoke Lenni- tive Americans often appear “unsophisticated,” but when you

Lenape Tribal Nation www.nlltribalnation.org, which works write historical ? ction, certain truths become self-evident. The tirelessly to preserve its culture.

Lenape were not backward; they were highly sophisticated, 16 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • November 2025

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