I woke up and read some shitty post about ghostwriting. And look - I get it. Business is business. But it made me realize something deeply weird underneath the whole thing.
How is it that you can hire a ghostwriter to produce whatever you want - books, lyrics, articles, newsletters, entire personal brands - and everyone treats it as completely normal? Major stars do it. Way more authors than we assume do it. Most online content is basically manufactured anyway. We all know it. We just politely avoid saying it out loud.
But the moment you bring AI into the conversation, suddenly everyone loses their minds.
Photo by Thalia Ruiz on Unsplash
“THIS IS NOT ART! DISGUSTING! INAUTHENTIC!”
Blah, blah, blah.
Why?
What exactly is the difference?
Because if you look at it honestly - using another human to create for you is, at the core, not fundamentally different from using a tool trained on human-created patterns. A guy who’s written 50,000 articles for different clients is, in a sense, just as “generic” as the model people love to complain about. Both are systems that reproduce patterns. Both rely on accumulated inputs. Both are shaped by other people’s work.
So what’s the real problem?
That with AI you pay for software instead of paying some dude?
That the illusion of “pure genius” disappears?
Or is it just jealousy - the fear that someone will get paid without suffering through the same rituals, gatekeeping, and inefficiency?
And then there’s one more layer: every book, every article, every “masterpiece” goes through multiple rounds of edits, beta readers, proofreaders, editors, agents, marketing consults… a whole invisible committee. How can we even talk about a work being the singular creation of one person anymore? Maybe it’s time to update our ideas of authorship - especially when 95% of what gets published or posted is low-effort trash anyway.
And yes - this post was edited by an AI.
Not to “write it for me,” but simply to clean up the mess I produce when I type straight from my head. When I try to make it look nice on my own, I lose all the depth. When I focus too much on the letters and the form, I lose the substance - the only thing that actually matters to me. Form can be beautiful, sure, but without substance it’s just a hollow shell. So I let the machine handle the brushing and combing.
But here’s the important part: look at the structure. The paragraphs. The rhythm. The shape.
If you pay attention, you’ll notice that most people on Substack — especially the loudest ones complaining about AI — use eerily similar formats, pacing, and dynamics in their posts.
Be more aware.
AI isn’t the problem here.
The real shortage isn’t “authenticity,” it’s actually having something to say.
I’m sick of artists debating what artists should be. Let’s be honest: we haven’t seen a real one in half a century. Not since money took over everything.
Am i onto something or just raging?