Ghost Writing

What Ghost Writing Is and what It Isn’t
Ghost writing is a concept that often sparks heated debates. It’s usually perceived as a practice that lies on the brink of illegality, and few know what it really is. Surprisingly, ghost writing is rarely discussed in the context of AI-generated text.
As someone who has written, reviewed, revised, planned, and graded thousands of academic papers and manuscripts, I often get questions regarding ghost writing and whether it isn’t illicit practice. So, let me delineate what ghost writing is, and I’ll argue that we should consider ghost writing in the discussion of AI-generated text.
What Ghost Writing Actually Is
Ghost writing is the activity of writing something for someone else without being acknowledged as the author of the text. In other words, a ghost writer secretly writes text in someone else’s name.
Ghost writing is much more common than generally assumed. Within and among companies, organizations, and institutions, texts are constantly composed and published without their writers being acknowledged. This concerns marketing texts, business reports, and legal documents as much as it concerns emails and social media posts.
In addition to corporate ghost writing, also individual authors, like politicians, entrepreneurs, or celebrities, use ghost writers to have their books, speeches, articles, or songs written professionally. Ghost writing is omnipresent. And indeed, ghost writing is legal.
The person who’s responsible for the final text is not the ghost writer but the person whose name figures underneath the text. That’s why that person is usually allowed to make final amendments to the text.
The reasons why people and organizations opt for working with ghost writers are the same as those in other kinds of outsourcing: they lack the skills, and they lack the time.
Ghost Writing Is Outsourcing
The time factor is crucial. Writing a text that hits target takes practice, and practice takes time. So, an inexperienced writer will need much more time than an experienced one.
Another factor is expertise. Writing requires many different skills, so working with a ghost writer is like taking a shortcut. Ghost writers are linguistically versatile: they know how to convincingly present an argument, how to make complex information accessible, how to reach the target audience, and even how to do all this while optimizing search engine response. Based on these skills, ghost writers achieve one principal goal: persuasion.
Persuasion is achieved when the addressee – be it the management, client, thesis supervisor, committee, or any other target audience – is convinced of the skills, expertise, and integrity of the author to the degree of accepting the information coming from them as trustworthy. Especially in today’s busy world, persuasion is powerful.
So, ghost writers are specialists, and working with a ghost writer is simply outsourcing the tedious part of the job to a specialist.
Yet, if things are this simple, why is ghost writing often seen as illicit?
Ghost Writing in Academia
The confusion arises from the fact that ghost writing is often publicly criticized in contexts of fraudulent research. In academic contexts, ghost writing conflicts with ethical standards, because for researchers, it’s crucial to elaborate their theses themselves. In consequence, having one’s own thesis written by a ghost writer who wasn’t acknowledged counts as illicit and entails the loss of a position or degree.
In academia, ghost writing is problematic because authorship is crucial.
At the same time, having amendments made to one’s own text has been common practice in academia for a long time. For example, if I aim to publish an article and submit it to a journal, then I’ll most likely ask a colleague to read it and give me expert feedback before I submit. Once I’ve submitted, I’ll receive feedback from the journal’s reviewers. All this feedback will leave its mark on my article.
Still, it continues to be my article because I decide what feedback I’ll consider, and it’s me who’s responsible for the final article.
In other words, getting feedback that flows into one’s paper is common practice in academia. It isn’t ghost writing; it’s regulated practice. What isn’t regulated, however, is text written by a software.
AI-Generated Text and Authorship
If applied logically, the issue with authorship also applies to AI-generated text: if the text was written by a software, like ChatGPT, its author is the software. If a human then revises the text, that human does not automatically become the author of the text. The author continues to be the software.
Yet, the software cannot reject revisions, like researchers do. So, the person who’s prompted the text becomes the official author. The moment they put their name underneath the text, the prompter becomes the author and the software becomes the ghost writer.
In academia, this is a problem because authorship is tied to ownership. Words and knowledge are closely intertwined, and in research, any information’s source must be indicated unless it’s one’s own. Otherwise, it counts as illicit practice.
Accordingly, since software tools have been enabled to produce text based on the information they’re fed with, determining the author of AI-generated text is difficult.
Does this Mean that AI Shouldn’t Be Used?
No, it is possible to use AI. It just depends on how AI is used. Most universities allow students and researchers to use AI in their research as long as sources are listed.
This rule, however, only refers to a text’s content. It doesn’t refer to the text. Many universities lack explicit guidelines as to how AI is handled in text generation, because basic AI has been used in text enhancement for decades. Plus: technology, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation using specific sources only, is evolving faster than universities respond to it.
My take on this is that the discussion cannot be left to universities or politics. Nor to technology. In the end, it’s a question of integrity. And the well-established rules of ghost writing can help us in this.
About the Author
Consultant | Coach | Author
Danae Perez is a versatile language expert with vast experience in both research as well as the corporate world and a contagious passion for languages and people. She holds a PhD in linguistics and has published her research on the evolution of languages in multilingual contexts with the most renowned publishing houses. Danae Perez has been providing language services and communication consultancy for corporate clients for nearly two decades and has worked in a myriad of countries, cultures, and industries. She has the rare gift of quickly grasping the essence of a message and putting it into the right words to facilitate communication between people, cultures, and disciplines.