I'm vaguely aware of conversations going on regarding authors using AI for ghostwriting. I say "vaguely" because I recall having caught snippets of remarks in my periphery for months, without actually listening harder to find out more. But the question came up recently in one of my communities, and it was enough to get my brain mulling over the subject.

The problem of trust

Where things start to get dodgy might be in how the author and their work are then positioned to the public. If we're told the author is a creative person who single-handedly wrote a particular book, and is thus deserving of all the courtesy, trust, credit and emotional connection generated from that book, then it would come as quite a shock to later learn this isn't true.

You only have to look at how different the reactions were to Hatsune Miko (an obviously virtual pop idol) and Sorcha Rowan (the #OwnVoices lesbian romance author who later admitted to being a cis man) to see that honesty and trust play a big part in whether something is decidedly okay.

The problem of theft

Relevant to the conversation about present-day AI is the topic of intellectual property theft. The AI bots making headlines today were trained on HEAPS of source material, maybe even content you yourself have posted online. This is an excellent explainer.

Say you're an author, and you hired a ghostwriter who turned in a manuscript that word-for-word stole from a bunch of sources. You wouldn't be happy about that. And if you released that manuscript as a book, your readers might feel cheated too. As would the author(s) your ghostwriter stole from, especially since the hard work they put into writing the original material doesn't translate to putting food on their table.

As scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer/activist Cory Doctorow point out in their very topical book Chokepoint Capitalism:

precious little of the vast wealth generated by art and culture is shared with the people who actually make it

What happens when the waters don't rise?

In principle, I feel it's fine for an author to use a ghostwriter. In the best of circumstances, it doesn't seem so different to an old-school atelier where the principal artist might get an assistant to grind minerals, mix paints and do other less-challenging jobs:

A gifted assistant would be trusted to fill in less important parts of a work the master was creating, for example, the hands of a figure, a background scene or applying areas of gold leaf.

In which case, the author whose name appears on the book cover retains creative control, masterminding the creation of a literary experience. That's good enough for me. (Although I'm pretty sure my favourite authors wrote all of their own material.)

Having been a ghostwriter as well as having worked with ghostwriters, I can say it's sometimes very nice to focus solely on one aspect of the work without worrying about everything else too, knowing that your efforts contribute to a collective effort to produce something positive.

Where I'd question the involvement of AI is when it deprives a human writer of an honest income. Technology is meant to make our lives better, and by "our", I mean "all of our", not just yours and mine. Paying for creative work from independent, possibly marginalised creatives, is how we in the creative community help each other stay afloat in an ocean of wealthy and powerful corporations who don't care if we sink as long as their pockets are full.

If rising waters lifts all ships, what happens when when the waters don't rise? What happens in a market where players have normalised the race to the bottom?

I fear that as a technology-using society which still sees creative people marginalised and overshadowed by profiteers, if we don't stop to think properly about the nuances of what we're doing, it won't be long before we find out.