Ghost Writing: On AI Before AI

This essay traces a pre-history of today's AI writing anxieties through the older profession of ghostwriting, from the word's first appearance in a 1908 Nebraska newspaper to nineteenth-century Spiritualist "automatic writing." The author argues that ghostwriting accustomed society to letting the intellectual labor of writing remain invisible, and connects this to Vauhini Vara's 2021 Believer essay "Ghosts," written with an OpenAI text tool before ChatGPT's release. It also cites sociologist Antonio Casilli's account of "ghost work"—humans who trained algorithms, including ghostwriters feeding language-as-data into platforms that now compete with them.