Does AI Make 1 Better Ghostwriter Obsolete?

There is a battle between AI and ghostwriters going on.

On one side, there is the ghostwriter. Ghostwriting is a craft. It takes practice, knowledge, skill, and experience to be able to pull a client’s story out of their head and get it onto a page while maintaining their voice, tone, style, and facts of the story.

On the other side is artificial intelligence, or AI. It can process figurative tons and tons of data at speeds as fast as 9.95 quintillion times that of humans, according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

To give you another idea, the Simplilearn website said that while a human can solve one math problem in five minutes, artificial intelligence can solve ten problems in one minute (the blog doesn’t specify what type of math problem, however).

Humans can’t compete with that speed. If it takes a year for a human to write a book, AI theoretically can do fifty books in the same time. According to The Writers For Hire blog, humans are having a harder time telling the difference between that which was written by a human and that which was written by GPT-4.

Time for ghostwriters to give up and cede authority to our computer overlords, right? 

As Judd Nelson’s character said in The Breakfast Club, “Not even close, BUD!”

Like with the Death Star, artificial intelligence has a fatal flaw: It isn’t human. 

Sure, it can automate way faster than any human, but it’s limited by its program and the data it consumes. It can regurgitate and produce words, passages, and pages that sound like Shakespeare, Hemingway, Vonnegut, Steinbeck, Austen, Angelou, or Fitzgerald. But it can’t create something new. It can only copy what has been previously written. 

A human, meanwhile, can create entire worlds and the people that inhabit them. Gene Roddenberry created an entire universe called Star Trek, and George Lucas did the same with Star Wars. Bob Kane and Bill Finger co-created the world where Batman exists. 

The best AI could do is “create” the worlds of Space 1999, Starcrash, and Moon Knight, which are known knockoffs of their more famous brethren.

Humans understand nuance and subtlety; AI does not. A human knows the difference between (and this example I found online) a stubborn child, a determined child, and a contrary child because a human understands context. So, a ghostwriter can write, “I WILL NOT!” to convey stubbornness, “I will!” to show determination, and “Why not?” to connote contrariness. Artificial intelligence has to spell it out.

Humans have wisdom and experience to fall back on, and they can use that wisdom and experience to emotionally connect with a reader; AI can’t go back to its childhood and remember the trauma that informed its future. It can’t make a mistake, realize it, and learn from it so it doesn’t repeat it.

A human can think critically; AI cannot. That means a human can take a piece of information and, through research or its own experience, realize it’s false; AI can’t. A human can realize that bit of information has been plagiarized from another source or completely made up; AI cannot. 

A human knows confidentiality, what it means, and how to apply it in the world. Any other wishes the client has, the human ghostwriter can honor them and work with them. AI on the other hand, has no ethics, scruples, or morality.

The Writing King quotes Carol Tice, freelance writer and founder of Make a Living Writing: “Effective ghostwriting is more than simply writing. It involves understanding the client’s voice, goals, audience, and platform.” AI can’t do that.

However, artificial intelligence is here to stay and can be quite useful to a ghostwriter. For example, a ghostwriter can ask AI to research a topic or a subject—as I did for this very post.

But until AI becomes sentient a la Skynet, there will always be a need for human ghostwriters.

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