The Integration of AI in Ghostwriting Practices
We live in the age of high demand for high quality content and this need is steadily growing. Influencers, politicians, business and economical leaders, as well as celebrities can no longer craft their messages themselves as they cannot do that in a compelling way and they simply lack time for that. Articulating the narratives has been the prerogative of professional ghostwriters, but nowadays they also need help to cope with the pressures of present needs. Thus, in the majority of book writing cases, there is always the story behind the story. What is this new unseen force that ghostwriters use? Of course, these are AI technologies which have penetrated all spheres of life, getting the status of a secret weapon for great writers.
Can the AI technologies be useful in creating content like human writers do? For sure they can.
1. Generating ideas
Ghostwriting is based on creating ideas for others. With the help of AI, there is no need in hours for brainstorming and collecting numerous ideas to choose a few. Instead, by providing carefully selected keywords, you can give the order to a writing platform to get a list of ideas and then choose the most appropriate ones from a lot suggested.
2. Saving time required for editing
Reviewing and editing the written articles always demands huge effort. If it is possible to avoid that with the help of AI, then why not do that?
3. Improving the level of consistency and accuracy of writing
It is natural for human writers to overlook certain inconsistencies or be rather inaccurate with dates, numbers, or statistics. With the help of AI technologies, you can make the level of professionalism in this piece of writing much higher.
So, both ghostwriting and generating content with AI tools can do the following:
- streamlining the workflow
- providing effective content for the clients
- improving quality and boosting speed
Why Book Writing Often Involves Assistance
Even being inspired and motivated to write a book, a thought leader or a professional in a certain area finds it too difficult to start a process without help. With plenty of ideas and a lot to teach others, they still feel that lack of time and fear to write the first word on the page keeps them from doing that. Hiring a ghostwriter would be a solution in this case, and so is generative AI.
AI does similar things ghostwriters used to do: it extracts the ideas from the head of the nominative author and enhances the ability to begin and end the book. Ghostwriters can benefit from AI in the book-writing process, though it cannot replace them entirely for now. As Forbes explains, AI tools are already transforming the way authors approach storytelling.
1. Overcoming the syndrome of a ‘blank page’
AI gives a list of ideas, some ways to outline the story, and new characters, themes, and creative strategies to work on the book.
2. Organizing and structuring
With the help of AI, ghostwriters find new narrative structures, outline chapters, make progress with the plot, and structure the ideas.
3. Doing research
Summarizing the needed information, researching the historical background, and polishing arguments require a lot of time, and AI can do that really fast.
4. Improving readability
There will be no more problems with sentence structure, grammar, and style if AI checks the text and makes it sound more professional and readable.
5. Crafting plots
The narrative will be enriched if AI suggests new plot twists, characters, or options for dialogues.
Ethics and Integrity: AI and Ghostwriting
Can ghostwriting be referred to as an ethical activity? It is rather doubtful that someone may give a positive answer to this question. What actually happens? I pay for the service of writing an article on a specific topic and I receive it from some more or less qualified ghostwriter. After that I use this article as my own without any reference to the actual writer. Well, it is not stealing ideas as they are compensated for, but it is still not something to be proud of or to tell about. I pretend to be the author, while the actual author gets some money. In case you use ChatGPT, the strategy is very much alike with little effort exerted but without any compensation paid.
So, the question is: why should those who need articles pay for the services of human ghostwriters if they can get the same for free from the AI tools? It seems ghostwriting is gradually losing its value and there are new concerns about the authorship as related to using AI. Even if ChatGPT is used only for assistance with editing and revising, it is not clear whether this should be viewed as co-authorship or simple editing if, for example, the scope of changes is significant.
Actually, Forbes also outlines two types of writing content which are further subcategorized with two tricks involved:
- Human-written content:
- rewrite AI – a writer paraphrases and restructures the AI-generated paper to make it look like human-written
- write like AI – human-written papers are rewritten or written from scratch to appear as if they were composed by AI. Using the patterns associated with ChatGPT writing, you start mimicking AI. It is the reason for ‘false positive’ plagiarism check results.
- AI-generated content:
- using default prompts – AI tools get a prompt to generate a common piece of writing they always do
- using directive prompts – AI tools get a set of usual prompts and an additional one to write like a human does
So, the patterns of human writing are the basis for generative AI writing, but at the same time some humans can pattern the writing of generative AI.
All in all, considering plagiarism in terms of ethics, both the use of ghostwriting services and using AI for writing are types of cheating. Checking the papers with such tools as PlagiarismSearch can trace fraud, but it will not show that someone was compensated for writing the paper. It will not show that a robot was used to create an outline, write a draft, or paraphrase the parts taken from someone’s work either.
Tips for Ghostwriters in Terms of AI Use
- Learn the fundamentals of AI prompting — You will get excellent results only if you know how to prompt the AI correctly.
- Don’t take AI suggestions for granted — Only a mixture of human creativity and AI technicality can be a success.
- Maintain your voice and intuition — It is always evident that the text is generated by AI only; so, you need to take some smart measures to benefit from technical progress and maintain authenticity at the same time.
Make AI a partner in crime! If a ghostwriter cares about efficiency and wants to save loads of time, a nice solution is to enhance the creative process with the help of AI. A human writer takes responsibility for connection with the audience, emotional message, and ideas to impress, while AI gets an insight into the technical things. The AI tools are getting more and more sophisticated daily, and who knows what will happen next in the sphere of storytelling. Let’s wait and see.
