How 1,190 Great Professional Writers View AI

What do writers really think of artificial intelligence? It depends on how much you use it. The more you do, the more likely you view it positively.

That’s one of the results that came out of a recent study by Gotham Ghostwriters and Josh Bernoff, a Portland, Maine-based advisor, coach, editor, and ghostwriter.

Entitled “A.I. and the Writing Profession,” the study surveyed 1,190 writing professionals across numerous professions, of which most were between ages 45-64 and two thirds were women. It found “Those who exploit AI the most swear by it, while those who don’t use it fear it.”

The study broke AI users down into four categories: advanced, basic, dabbler, and non-user. Advanced AI users, which totaled one in six surveyed, use AI tools daily and perform at least six different types of tasks with AI weekly, although the study didn’t specify the tasks. Advanced users spend an average of thirty-three hours a week hours a week writing and editing.

Basic users also use AI daily and perform between three and six different tasks weekly. They average thirty hours a week writing and editing.

Dabblers (of which I’m one), use AI sometimes or perform up to two tasks weekly and average twenty-eight hours a week writing and editing. And non-users don’t use AI (obviously) and average thirty hours a week writing and editing.

What the survey found was that ninety-two percent of writing professionals who are advanced AI users said AI makes them more productive, and they estimated they were a third more productive. This same group also believes by a wide margin (59%) that using AI makes the writing quality somewhat better or much better.

“For writers, it’s clear that the most intense AI users are becoming more productive and generating more opportunities and, in some cases, higher incomes,” the study said. The median income in this group was $120,100, or sixty-four percent higher than non-users. However, Bernoff was careful to not equate AI use with salary. What he said on a recent webinar that the people using AI the most are often in highly paid positions and want to use it to increase efficiency.

“Writers who use AI less intensively would benefit from leaning into the opportunities it appears to be creating, adopting new AI uses such as brainstorming, summarizing research, and suggesting titles and words,” the survey said.

The study also identified that the writers spent an average of thirty hours a week writing. There were a lot of different writing professionals included, with content marketing writers, journalists, ghostwriters, and nonfiction authors among the most common. But there also were plenty of copy writers, thought leadership writers, and editors.

ChatGPT was far and away the most of the eighteen tools listed. Seventy-six percent of writing professionals surveyed, which included 87% of advanced AI users, use it. The other most common tools were Claude (33% writers, 54% advanced AI users). Grammarly (37% all, 44% advanced), Google Gemini, (25% all, 26% advanced), Perplexity (19% all, 30% advanced), and Otter.ai (17% all, 22% advanced), which Bernoff said is popular for transcription.

Here are some other findings:

● Across all writing professions, 61% use AI tools. Among these, thought leadership writers, PR professionals, content marketing writers use it the most. Copy editors, journalists and technical writers use it the least.

● Almost three out of four (74%) writing professionals say it makes them more productive.

● The professional writers using AI most frequently have $47,000 higher incomes.

● 57% of the people using AI the most feel AI is positive for the writing profession.

● 5o% think it has improved their writing prospects.

Reasons for using AI

This was one area of the study that divided users by specific writing profession, so I could compare all writers versus ghostwriters. First, of the writers in the survey, twenty-one percent were book ghostwriters.

● 72% use AI to suggest possible titles or headings (62% of ghostwriters do that).

● 71% use it as a replacement for web research (77% of ghostwriters do, including me).

● 68% brainstorm ideas with AI (as do 63% of ghostwriters surveyed, including me).

● 68% use AI in place of a thesaurus (57% of ghostwriters do).

● 63% fuse it or other forms of research (66% of ghostwriters do).

● 63% generate text that then is edited and/or rewritten (54% of ghostwriters do this).

Bernoff highlighted that only seven percent generate text that then is published without any editing or rewriting. Only five percent of ghostwriters do that.

Now for the concerns

Of course, not everything was positive. 

● Eighty-nine percent expressed worry that corporate leaders will replace writers with AI. 

● Eight in ten said they were worried AI is making writing more boring. 

● Ninety percent worried about hallucinations, which are AI-generated responses that are false and/or misleading but presented as fact.

● A little more than eight in ten (81%) worry that copyrighted writings are not given enough protections from AI.

Then there are the non-users. Sixty percent say AI lets less experienced writers displace more experienced writers, and 82% predict professional writing opportunities will decrease in the next five years.

There also was an expressed desire to do something about identifying and labeling AI content as such. Eighty-two percent of all writers think AI content should be labeled. Almost the same amount (79%) think it is unfair AI is trained on their work without permission.

What does it all mean? What’s needed?

The study was very blunt: “Writers who are not using AI are at risk of being left behind.”

However, the study also concluded that, although 43% said they know somebody who lost their job to AI, there remains a need for experienced, human writers.

“Simply insisting that full-time and contract writers use AI is poor strategy, since there are many potential pitfalls for inexperienced writers, including generating low-quality AI slop, allowing hallucinations to get into published material, and leaking confidential material into AI tools’ training sets.”

Finally, publishers and media companies “must use AI to empower editorial talent, not as a poor substitute.” 

It’s a lot to digest. Leave your comments about what you think about AI and if you’re advanced, basic, dabbler, or non-user.

Feel free to read and check out my other posts related to ghostwriting. Go to leebarnathan.com/blog.