Your business book: should you give your ghostwriter an AI-written draft?

Until recently, writing your business book without spending months pounding a keyboard could only mean one thing: hiring a ghostwriter. And as a ghostwriter myself, I’d say that was an excellent option.

But today, there’s a new route you might be considering using: using AI to write your book.

Now we all know AI has its drawbacks and that using it to write a whole book without any human editing isn’t going to end well. The output will be soulless, unconvincing and often plain meaningless.

But is there another option? What if there were a combination of the two that could work: generating a draft with AI and asking a ghostwriter to turn it into an engaging book written in your voice?

It’s a seductive idea for any aspiring business author. Who doesn’t love the prospect of shortcutting the writing process by asking a machine to do the heavy lifting, while reducing ghostwriting costs at the same time?

It’s a win win. Isn’t it?

You’re going to expect me to say ‘no’. And as I wouldn’t want to disappoint you, here it is: No.

But the full answer is somewhat more nuanced. It’s important that, if you’re considering going down this route, you do it in possession of the full facts – from a business book ghostwriter who has seen many AI-generated drafts and understands what it takes to write a meaningful, compelling book.

The best way to show you is to take each part of the book writing process in turn.

Strategising

AI can help you brainstorm ideas around your topic, target readership, and the market potential for your book. In fact, it’s one of the areas it’s most useful for.

But be careful. AI has a tendency to deliver what it thinks you want, and it can’t see the gaps in your understanding of the book strategy process. It also only know what you tell it, and you might not think of everything that’s relevant.

An experienced ghostwriter, on the other hand, has been here many times before. They’re skilled at asking the right questions to draw out your thoughts, and will carefully probe your assumptions. They can also come up with ideas that connect your expertise with both your book and your audience in creative and unexpected ways.

Many’s the time I’ve joined the dots between what makes an author’s work special and the strategic direction of their book, sometimes alighting on an angle that’s different and exciting. And I’ve done it by asking questions the author never thought to pose.

Conclusion: by all means use AI to help you plan your book. But be open to the more creative and personal ideas a ghostwriter might have; these are what will make your book stand out.

Structuring

As with strategising, structuring is an area that AI can be helpful for. It can take your ideas, notes, and research and magically turn them into a coherent and logical framework that forms the basis of a convincing book. I can’t be alone in being impressed by how quickly and efficiently it does this.

But as with planning, there are limitations to what AI will give you. While it’s adept at spitting out something that looks convincing, it can be hard for an inexperienced author to spot the holes and flaws in its argument.

There’s also the lack of creativity to take into account. A machine delivers the most conventional and expected structure, whereas a ghostwriter can use their imagination and experience to suggest an outline that taps into what you didn’t even know you wanted. And that surprises and delights your readers.

Conclusion: using AI to create an outline, whether of the whole book or of individual chapters, can be a helpful starting point – but it will give you standardised results. A ghostwriter can deliver a more intuitive structure that’s bespoke to you.

Writing

This is the big one, and it’s where the relationship between AI and ghostwriting can start to crumble.

When you use AI to draft your book and hand it over to a ghostwriter to turn it into something personal and engaging, you might imagine you’re giving the ghostwriter a head start. This, you assume, should speed up the process and reduce the amount you pay them.

I’m not going to say that never happens, because every AI-generated manuscript is different, as is every author. But most times you create problems you may not have considered:

• You’ve created a boring job for a ghostwriter. When I ghostwrite a book from interviews with my client, I spark off their personality, way of speaking, ideas, intent, and other human aspects that we’re all designed to respond to. But when I’m editing or re-writing a machine text, I have to supply the humanity myself. And given I haven’t had the indepth conversations I would have needed without the draft, that means drawing purely from my own ideas and creativity – which is hard work. Because of this, some ghostwriters charge considerably more for working off AI material.
• You lose the opportunity to enrich your book through human-to-human interaction. When I gather content by listening to my clients talk, I can ask them questions and probe their thoughts. This might generate new ideas and even whole new ways of seeing the book. But with AI, no matter how many times you refine your prompts, it’s likely to give you the same set of recycled points, just presented in different ways.
• You create copyright dangers. In the US and some other countries, AI-generated text is not copyrightable. That means the sentences and paragraphs you generate with AI that your ghostwriter doesn’t change are not yours to use, and your publisher will want to know about them. Of course, the ghostwriter can re-write the entire manscript, but that takes away the point of having it in the first place.
• You can fall into hallucination traps. It can be hard to know what’s true and what’s not with AI-generated text, and the same goes for plagiarised wording. As the author, it’s your responsibility to check the veracity of your work. Of course, you can go through it with a fine toothed comb and weed out any falsehoods, but do you really have the patience for that?

Conclusion: while generating an AI draft seems quicker and easier than talking to a ghostwriter in interviews or gathering an array of disparate materials, the output you hand over to them is no simple editing job.

Your ghoswriter will have to spend a lot of time and effort turning it into a compelling book by imbuing it with personality and unearthing what needs to be added in (and taken out) to make it work.

There are times when this might be less onerous than a normal ghostwriting job, but the resulting book is still likely to be more generic than if it had been written from scratch. And while the ghostwriter can make every effort to avoid this, the machine draft has a habit of exerting what ghostwriter Josh Bernoff calls a ‘gravitational pull’, dragging the book in whatever the direction the AI thought best.

None of this is to suggest that AI has no place in the ghostwriting process. Ghostwriters themselves might use AI to help them organise the text, suggest ideas and provide feedback – among other things. And you as an author could find it a great sparring partner to help you develop the framework for your book and develop the basic content.

But shortcutting the writing process? Hopefully you can see why it doesn’t work like that. Really, you’d be better off skipping the AI step and going straight to a ghostwriter from the start.

If you’d like to chat about your own book draft, whether AI has had a hand in it or not, feel free to get in touch.