Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used “to tell” at all.
In one sense, writers can ignore semiotics, because they've been practicing it all their lives. Every communication you've ever made, in every medium, has been an exercise in signalling. With that much hands-on experience, you might find the theory here a little besides the point. But I think that if you want to do something really exciting with a machine, you need to know its edge cases, and theory is a great way of finding those.
