Ghost Writing: Tracing the prehistory of AI writing back to spiritualist automatic writing
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An article tracing the origin of the term "ghostwriter" argues that the debate over "who the author really is" raised by AI writing is not a new problem. The article says the word first appeared in the Lincoln Daily Star in 1908, and its predecessor can be linked to "automatic writing" in the spiritualist movement of the late 19th century; this history shaped society's acceptance of the invisibility of the writing process. The article places this prehistory alongside the spread of language generators such as Writerly and Claude, arguing that they have brought the question of authorship back to the surface.
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- Hacker News AIGhost 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.
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