Isn’t it kinda dishonest?

Our judgments about people passing off someone else’s creative work as their own are often well-founded, but muddied and selective. For starters they individualize what is ultimately a collective condition. Capitalism’s raison d’etre is people (owners) claiming the creative work of others as their own (by renting labor). Did Steve Jobs invent the iPod? Of course not. But you probably can’t name the person who did. Nor can you name any of the umpteen people who’ve jumped to their deaths out of despair, working in the Chinese Foxconn factories where much of Apple’s output is manufactured.

When a staff writer at a major outlet is assigned a story and delivers it, chances are you next to never notice or remember the name in the byline (and wire services like Reuters and AP typically withhold them, entirely). You remember the outlet. The briefs those writers work from are not meaningfully dissimilar to the brief a ghostwriter gets from a client, and you functionally credit them about the same.

Meanwhile many, many homeowners could not afford their mortgages but for having someone else pay it every month as tenants who have no legal claim to what they’re paying for— begging real questions about what accounts for substantive “ownership” in this broader morality we’re trying to pin down.

The boundaries that police our anxiety about something like ghostwriting are incredibly blurry, and our attention to them is random, at best. At the very least, it’s an odd hill to die on given what could be won by challenging the relationships that determine ownership, at greater scale.

Doesn’t ghostwriting allow people to pass themselves off as thoughtful/credentialed in ways they aren’t?

Sometimes, sure. But in the cases where that’s true, you can usually sniff it out pretty quickly, because the person in question is just reaching way too far and opening themselves up to reasonable skepticism. Even in the years I was actually party to academic fraud, ghostwriting for graduate students — the issue was never that those people were incapable of the work I was doing for them. In every case, they had a better command of their subject matter. They were simply drowning in deadlines and an ecosystem of unmanageable demands. Which is precisely why so many graduate students have unionized in recent years.

In more professional contexts, the people hiring me have typically acquired a platform or audience I don’t have. And that is usually down to them having demonstrated their strengths in a given field, with considerable distinction. Sit with that for a moment, and you pretty quickly land on how unlikely it is such accomplishment affords free time to A] Write anything that carries impact, or B] Develop as a writer, at all. I’m delighted to help stage critical interventions at the scale of and maximize the power of someone else’s platform. Inasmuch as I don’t have one or want all the hassle that comes with that sort of visibility, it’s frankly chocolate in my peanut butter, and helps us get important shit done.

People who hire ghostwriters are simply doing what absolutely massive numbers of people are now doing (even as part of their job description), outsourcing writing to AI platforms like ChatGPT. The most consequential difference, there, is that AI comes with up to 30 times the energy demands of a human — with staggering ecological and climate implications (not least that that this demand has forestalled the phaseout of things like coal-fired electricity production). Meanwhile, it produces a soulless, empty equivalent to diarrhea, in excessive volume, which you then have to wade through while someone in the formerly colonised world becomes a climate refugee.

Doesn’t outsourcing to ghostwriters prevent people from becoming better writers?

Again, sometimes. But in probably half the cases where that’s true, becoming a better writer is not the best use of that person’s time, nor is it going to yield downstream improvements in other areas of their work. In that sense, having a consultant advise on how to convert their work into compelling narrative content isn’t all that removed from writers having outside editors. Functionally, the same things are happening. No serious writer ever says “It’s fine to use editors for a while, but eventually you’ve gotta be able to go it alone.”

On the whole, I find something else entirely happening: The people who employ me to ghostwrite something gain new perspective on their work or subject matter, become familiar with different ways of talking about and organizing their expertise, and discover whole new ways of connecting with audiences — sometimes audiences they’d never considered. That has deep ramifications for their creative process more broadly. So, whether it makes them better writers (which it typically does; much in the same way reading gives us permission to try things we’ve seen other writers do), it almost always deepens their relationship with their area of focus.

I love those conversations. I’m grateful to be part of them, and even more grateful that they happen at all.