Ghost Writing: On AI Before AI

When is an author not an author? The question feels like the lead up to a nerdy joke. But these days, with the looming presence of artificial intelligence, I feel as if I am asking that question every time I read. Who really wrote these words, I wonder, reading a campus-wide email, or a student essay, or a form letter, or the transcript of a politician’s speech. As a writer myself, I feel that the advent of language generators like Writerly or Claude has put bedrock definitions of my profession into flux. How can we, my scientist-dean asks me seriously, train our students today to write well with AI? How we dialogue, or draft, or edit in white-space with language-generators requires for me a wholly different word than “writing.” We are training students to do something with language generators, but I know in my bones it isn’t that.

But I also know, thanks to my recent book, that there is a secret pre-history to these anxieties and debates. In the years before the internet, the answer to my joke was “when an author uses a ghostwriter,” and that answer, I argue, introduced gradual modifications to our notions of intellectual property, and evolving attitudes toward creative collaboration, that have helped establish our current relationship to writing with AI.

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Ironically, and despite its spectral name, ghostwriting is today an increasingly visible profession. Fictional ghostwriters now show up as main characters in popular books and movies, as in Robert Harris’s novel The Ghostwriter, Colleen Hoover’s, Verity, Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Trust. I find the internet littered with short-form pieces on the topic. The New Yorker runs a piece by JR Moehringer on what it was like to ghostwrite for Prince Harry; Lit Hub runs a piece on Moehringer’s now paradoxical fame. Real ghostwriters gather for a professional conference, and it is covered by The New York Times. And while the exact statistics are impossible to determine, several current ghostwriting websites proclaim that over 50% of the books currently on the NY Times non-fiction bestseller list have been ghostwritten, though many agents and ghostwriters assure me that figure is too low.

Now, with the advent of AI, that statistic will likely drop. Ghostwriting, to paraphrase one current website for the service, is the act of one person writing in another person’s name. But today, language generators can churn out language for appropriation, more cheaply and quickly than a human ghostwriter could. Today, ghostwriting websites must work to advertise why they could perform their writing-for-hire services better than a machine.

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According to the OED, the word “ghostwriter” first appeared in the English language in 1908. The words appear, somewhat surprisingly, in a Nebraska newspaper, the Lincoln Daily Star. “There are a dozen or so known, catalogued and labeled ‘ghost’ writers in town,” the quoted excerpt reads. “Few of them have ever seen their names in print.” The newspaper article in total refers to a new and “highly erotic” novel that bears one name on its cover but has been written, the anonymous journalist asserts, by one of these writers. Many other local ghostwriters are also apparently penning erotica for a fee. “I had no idea Lincoln, Nebraska was such a hotbed for… hot beds,” I write to a friend. Another, tamer usage of “ghost,” meaning a secret assistant, pops up in 1881.

Today, ghostwriting websites must work to advertise why they could perform their writing-for-hire services better than a machine.

I’m intrigued the use of scare quotes these earliest quotations. By calling these writers “ghost” writers or assistants, the journalists question their ontology and make a judgment, all at once. “Is your room clean or, you know, ‘clean,’” I ask my ten-year old, miming quotation marks with my hands. Is the “ghost” writer a real writer or a “real” writer? Is the ghost writer legitimate? Is the ghost writer supernatural? Does the ghost writer exist?

There is, actually, a long history of ghosts that write. And fittingly, the audience for these first references to “ghost” writers were a credulous, superstitious bunch. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the etymological references to ghostwriting first appear, also mark the rise of the Spiritualist movement, a movement that believed spirits persisted after death and could communicate with those here on earth. This was a time of communal seances, Ouija boards, and ghostly communication—ghost writing, in the literal sense. These ghosts required the living bodies of those around them—bodies identified as “mediums”—to help them speak, or rap, or write. And as Spiritualism took hold, many mediums advanced beyond spelling out words by Ouija board to something referred to as “automatic writing”: a practice in which the medium transcribes by hand spirit communications while the medium is in a trance.

Audiences of these mediums were treated to the physicality of writing, the process by which words get set—“automatically”—to the page. In these examples, the one doing the writing is mechanical, non-mysterious, under another’s sentient if ghostly control. But the stakes of these earliest examples of “ghostly writing,” I’d argue, were these: we became accustomed to letting the intellectual work of writing remain invisible. We became better able to visualize a truth about all writing, which is the fact that a writer’s source of inspiration—the mental process that tells a writer what to write—always remains unseen.

Ghostwriting, as a contemporary profession, now inversely involves a practice in which the person performing both the physical and intellectual labor of writing remains behind the scenes. But my point is that these earliest example of ghostly writing made us as a society more comfortable with not knowing, or not asking, how some forms of writing were produced. Desirous to have contact with a loved one, a celebrity, the believers did not probe too closely into how that access was achieved. Today, similarly, we are enamored of our first-person celebrity accounts, and our eyes rarely look for the ghostwriter behind the author’s name.

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Centuries later, in August 2021, the author Vauhini Vara published in an online edition of The Believer magazine an essay titled “Ghosts.” ChatGPT had not yet been released to the public—that would happen in November of 2022—but Vara had learned of its predecessors and had approached the CEO of OpenAI to ask if she could try one out. He agreed and provided her with access to a web app called “the Playground,” a text box into which she could type and then, with the click of a button, prompt the app to respond. On her end, as a writer, she felt that her activities were “illicit,” though she also enjoys the computer’s “lack of judgment.” She keeps feeding the Playground language, until one day she asks it “for its help in telling a true story…about my sister’s death.”

The resulting story, or stories, nine different vignettes in all, form the basis for Vara’s Believer piece, then the book she publishes in 2025. 

This, I think, reading her essay online, is my twenty-first century experience of “automatic writing.” This is my ghostly encounter with language emerging from some unseen source. Like the audience members at nineteenth-century séances, Vara is trying to reach across some impassable void. Her sister dies—that fact is the entire motivation for her exercise and the impossible story she has turned to AI to tell.

To be clear, Vara is not trying to contact her sister or ask some ChatBot to speak on her sister’s behalf. Her “ghostwriting” doesn’t go that direction, though AI users, I learn, do often turn to AI to contact the dead. There are “AI Ouija boards” out there, apps that don’t feature the physical board but present themselves as tools one can use to contact ghosts.

For these apps, the ghost in the machine responds to the questioner in writing, and I get a few free questions before I am prompted to pay a monthly fee. But the entire interface feels no different to me than the way I can pose questions to Google, or regular Chat GPT. AI has been ghostly all along.

There’s something vampiric as well as ghostly about these AI engagements. Today, we want human connection so desperately that we will talk to Siri, live with robots, and create bodiless, bloodless containers that draw on the vitality of those around them to exist.

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I wonder if, by becoming ever more open to the forms of writing assistance we experienced with ghostwriting, we over the centuries normalized changes to our definitions of intellectual property, authorship, and creativity in ways that have now brought AI, a technological Trojan Horse, too far inside our gates.

These earliest example of ghostly writing made us as a society more comfortable with not knowing, or not asking, how some forms of writing were produced.

Ghostwriters, like the other writers among us, are struggling to adapt. And yet even as they defend their jobs against this development, ghostwriters have played a role. The French sociologist Antonio Cailli, for example, describes the invisible human labor that historically resides behind all automation and has fueled the growing language-generative potential of A.I. In the years just preceding the launch of ChatGPT, he explains how humans, necessary to “train the algorithms,” often masqueraded as ChatBots to send data they’d culled from the internet back to some central start-up company to feed into the machines. This work has been dubbed “ghost work” by data scientists. Ghostwriters themselves acted as some of these initial low-paid laborers, feeding language-as-data into the very digital platforms (digit meaning numbers, but digit also referencing human hands) that now compete with them for jobs.

All these scenarios make me think that no matter what happens in our future, “to write” will almost certainly mean something different twenty years from now than it does today. Maybe “writing” will mean soon something mechanical, in which we robot-like hit a button merely to complete a task. Maybe, more optimistically, it will mean something closer to editing, or a second-order creativity, in which we refine and shape that which something else has made.

But maybe we are (d)evolving toward a true ghostwriting: a writing that involves no person, and a literary landscape never living, never dead.