AI Ghostwriting or 1 Great Writer?

When I worked as a copywriter, before my ghostwriting career took off, I attended various networking meetings and sold myself as one who could fashion a winning, compelling 30-second elevator pitch.

I hardly got any interest, and I soon saw why: Everybody seemed to think that if they could come up with a rhyming tagline, they were set. Of course, they were wrong. A quality introduction doesn’t just inform what a person does, it includes a unique value proposition. A rhyming tagline is unnecessary (I never had one).

I bring this up because the same thing is happening with AI ghostwriting. Many people think that AI ghostwriting with Claude or ChatGPT is good enough. And it is if their goals are high speed and low cost.

The reality is people aren’t choosing AI ghostwriting over a ghostwriter. They’re choosing a version of AI ghostwriting they imagine AI can provide.

The real question a person considering a ghostwriter should be asking isn’t “Can AI write my book?” Of course it can. What they should be asking is, “What does a ghostwriter actually do?”

Most people think ghostwriters write books. That’s actually only one part of the job. Before I write anything, I interview, organize, challenge assumptions, uncover forgotten memories, verify facts, find themes, and determine what story actually deserves to be told.

These require skills a human has: judgment, curiosity, empathy, collaboration. I’ve said it many times: AI can’t do emotion, subtlety, nuance. It doesn’t know a fact from a fiction. It doesn’t have years and decades of shared experience to draw on. 

I’ve also come to realize I might sound defensive when I say that. So instead, here are my responses to some common thoughts people have about AI ghostwriting.

1. “Writing is just putting words on a page.” My former networking friends told me as much. If writing were only typing words (or creating some rhyming tagline), ghostwriters would completely disappear like real ghosts. 

The real work begins before I ever write one sentence. My job is to help you determine what belongs in the book, what doesn’t, what order to tell it, and why your audience will care.

Take my clients the Bronx Brothers. They started out wanting to tell their full life story. That included a funny episode about a rooster named Kiki that crowed every morning, annoying the neighbors. So one day, they came home from school and were told Kiki had flown away. Guess what was served for dinner that night?

A very funny story, but it didn’t fit the narrative about two brothers making (and living with) the choice of joining a gang or not. So Kiki was chopped (like the real bird).

2. “AI is much cheaper.” True. If your goal is inexpensive, AI is for you. But the question you really should be asking is, “What is this book worth?”

If your goal is preserving your life’s work, burnishing your business bona fides, helping your reputation, or leaving a legacy to future generations, a ghostwriter will provide so much more value than AI ever can.

I had a therapist client who sought to tell his story for his family. He didn’t select me as his ghostwriter at first but returned to me when the person he chose didn’t have the skills to get into the weeds and really find out about his familial backgrounds. Through talking to my client, I learned he had two relatives sign the Declaration of Independence, and another write the Constitution’s preamble. Also his grandfather was New York governor. 

There’s a difference between using AI ghostwriting to produce words and hiring a person to discover your story.

3. “AI is faster.” True, but speed isn’t the same as progress. I can’t type 5,000 words in a minute, and you’re not paying me to do that. But I can sit with a client for ninety minutes and ask the right questions to get the client to dig deeper.

In other words, you’re buying access to your own material, to the parts you didn’t know were the good parts.

“Wow, you’re making me think. I like it,” is something I’ve often heard—including from a woman at the last networking meeting I attended in July.

AI ghostwriting can produce your story faster, but it can’t ask the follow-up questions that make you cry because you realize you have found the actual crux of the book.

4. “Everybody uses AI now.” It’s true that many more people do now than before. That includes me. I use AI for research, spelling, and as a junior assistant with another set of eyes who can see things in ten dimensions. 

But you need to remember that the more common AI ghostwriting becomes, the more valuable authentic human stories become.

Imagine asking AI to write a 72,000-word memoir about a woman who marries a psychopath, finds out he’s cheating on her, suffers PTSD, has to defend herself against the state seeking to recover the money he stole from investors that she knew nothing about, and then gets the law changed so it can never happen to anyone again. 

I will bet AI ghostwriting will not create a manuscript nearly as interesting and fascinating as my client who had that exact story.

A real memoir stands out now more than ever. If AI could write a memoir, it would have by now.

5. “People think ghostwriters just write, so why not let AI do it?” While writing occupies much of my time, I also have to research, interview, transcribe, brainstorm, fact-check, coach, listen, motivate, cheer, organize, chase, and ask difficult questions.

It is common that I do no writing in the first three to six months I’m working with a new client. The writing comes as the result of those twelve other tasks.

If you need a thousand words to help your SEO, AI might be right for you. But if you want to tell your grandchildren who you were and why you did what you did before their parents were born, you need someone who can sit across from you and ask what it felt like.

Discovering the real story. That’s what a ghostwriter does. That’s the conversation I have with every new client, and it’s one I’d be happy to have with you.

If you’re thinking about a book and want to talk through whether we’d be a good fit, take a look at some of my other posts on ghostwriting at https://leebarnathan.com/blog/ or reach out directly to set up a conversation.