The Ghost in the Machine is an Old Friend

What the Ancient Practice of Ghostwriting Reveals About AI and Authenticity

I’d like to start this week’s essay with a little story that happened to me some twenty-five years ago. During an academic conference, I took part in a discussion with a well-known computer science researcher. His main claim to fame was his work on early Internet protocols. Lesser known, however, was his prolific career as a novelist, engaging in what would now be called “world-building” across an extensive series of books. When somebody asked how he balanced a challenging dual career, which involved producing high-quality academic publications alongside writing fiction, his reply was surprisingly simple. “It’s quite straightforward,” he explained. “My publisher only needs a ten-page treatment for each book. They have someone else develop that into a full novel.”

The researcher in question was Hermann Maurer, an internationally recognized researcher at the Graz University of Technology, who is also credited with having authored the 12-book science fiction series Xperten. What Maurer described so openly was ghostwriting—the practice of hiring someone to write content that will be published under another person’s name. I still remember vividly that his open explanation of using a ghostwriter for his novels did not raise any eyebrows among our group. Interestingly, we considered it a completely acceptable practice.

Today, the AI-assisted writing process often looks similar to Maurer’s approach. It might begin with a concept or outline, which is then fed to an LLM. The machine drafts the words. The human edits them manually, revising for clarity, removing an unnecessary em-dash here, simplifying an overly complex construction there. However, even though the AI-augmented writer arguably contributes more to the finished text than Maurer, who only provided an initial expose, the non-human collaborator raises concerns not typically associated with human ghostwriting. With AI, we worry about authenticity, about whether AI-assisted writing somehow counts less than “real” authorship. With a human ghostwriter, we generally don’t.

This brings up an interesting question: Does the difference between a human and an AI ghostwriter really make a difference from the perspective of authorship? The current discourse saturates us with concerns about AI’s role in writing, often treating it as an unprecedented threat to what it means to be an author. In the following essay, I want to argue otherwise. AI has introduced nothing new to the concept of authorship. It has simply made existing practices more widely accessible. And in doing so, it has forced us to confront questions about collaboration and credit that we’ve been conveniently avoiding for centuries.

A shadow profession: the ancient and enduring history of the ghostwriter

A historical analysis reveals that the unease surrounding uncredited authorship is a modern sentiment applied to an ancient practice. Ghostwriting is deeply woven into the fabric of literary and political history, demonstrating that the need for authorial assistance is a cultural constant rather than a contemporary corruption.

From antiquity to the modern word

The practice emerged in ancient Greece with logographers, who were skilled orators hired to write court speeches for plaintiffs and defendants. In a society where citizens represented themselves in legal matters, demand for persuasive rhetoric created a professional class of speech-craftsmen. Lysias, a contemporary of Plato, became the most celebrated of these figures, praised for his ability to inhabit the voice and character of his clients so convincingly that the speeches felt authentic to the speaker rather than the writer.

This pattern of invisible authorship expanded as political power centralized. In the Roman Empire, anonymous writers composed speeches for senators and emperors, lending their rhetorical skill to figures like Julius Caesar and Nero. The practice adapted to each era’s power structures. Medieval scribes wrote on behalf of poorly educated royalty. And for centuries, Jesuit writers have authored papal encyclicals in service of the Vatican. One example is the Mystici corporis Christi, issued under Pope Pius XII’s name, but written by Sebastiaan Tromp. The pattern appears even in foundational religious texts; many biblical scholars believe St. Paul’s epistles were actually written by his students.

What linked these disparate examples was their shared character as bespoke services. A powerful patron needed words; a skilled writer provided them. The relationship remained artisanal—one writer, one client, one text at a time. This would change dramatically in the nineteenth century, when the practice migrated from the corridors of power into the realm of commercial publishing. The term “ghostwriter” itself emerged only in the early twentieth century, coined by American sports agent Christy Walsh to describe the writers he hired to produce content for famous athletes like Babe Ruth. But by the time the word appeared in print in a 1908 Nebraska newspaper, the practice it described had already begun transforming into something far more systematic.

The literary workshop and the fiction factory

The practice of ghostwriting had long been an open secret in the literary world, where it evolved from a bespoke service into a model of industrial production. Perhaps the most famous example is the 19th-century French author Alexandre Dumas. Many of his most celebrated works, including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, were created in close collaboration with other writers, most notably Auguste Maquet, who developed plots and wrote initial drafts but received no public credit. In France, these uncredited collaborators were often referred to by the racial slur nègre, a label that underscored the hierarchical nature of their work.

The Stratemeyer Syndicate, an American publishing company, perfected this workshop model in the 20th century, effectively turning authorship into a streamlined process. Their work includes well-known children’s classics such as Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys. The author name “Carolyn Keene” was a house pseudonym used by a rotating stable of ghostwriters who followed strict formulas, completely detaching the concept of authorship from a single individual and transforming it into a marketable brand.

The historical trajectory shows a clear pattern: the function of the author has been subject to the logic of industrialization. What began as a one-to-one craft service with the Greek logographers evolved into the workshop model of Dumas and then the full-scale factory production of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. This progression culminates in the modern literary empires of figures like James Patterson, who openly collaborates with a team of co-writers. He has described his process as one of delegation, where he focuses on the overarching creative vision and plot, while others handle the labor of producing the prose. The “voice” of the author, in this context, becomes a product that can be scaled and mass-produced—a historical precedent that sets the stage for the industrial-scale content generation of AI.

The ethics of invisibility: a spectrum of acceptance

The ethical standing of ghostwriting is not absolute. It is highly contextual, defined primarily by audience expectations and the potential for deception or harm. An examination of its use across different domains reveals a clear spectrum of public acceptance.