Will AI make me obsolete? You be the judge

The world of ghost-writing is a house with no nameplate. You knock, you enter, you leave — but the letterbox bears someone else’s surname. The arrangement is older than ink stains. In the Paris salons, the smoke-thick clubs of London, the brash boardrooms of New York, the unseen hand has always hovered just out of frame.

If authorship is nine-tenths perspiration and one-tenth inspiration, then ghost-writing is ten-tenths discretion. The byline gleams; the writer vanishes. A paradox in plain sight …

Wait. Let’s cut the con. Those first two paragraphs in italics are not by your columnist. Me, in other words. Sneakily, I’d banked on another to tackle ghost-writing. A clanker, in fact, a robot vassal called ChatGPT. Sure, I feel sheepish in hindsight, but the exercise was revealing. Scary at first blush, until you read between the lines.

Take a fresh look at the intro. While none of that was me, my ghost haunts the slug’s cadence, the punchy whimsy. Even the way that you, the reader, have been pulled into the prose. Goes to show the LLM – or Large Language Model – has digested its share of WordPlays, responding in commendable mimicry to my request: “Give me 500 words on ghost-writing in the style of David Astle.”

The simulation arrived, spelling my obsolescence in eight seconds. Until I pored the gush, including the extended echo of the 420 words missing here. What I found was tinsel minus a tree. Revisit the words and you’ll sense a vacuum. While ghost-writing is the topic, where’s the theme? The argument?

Asked another way: “Where’s the human?” Since AI is adept at the dazzle or funnelling dense topics into lucid grabs – even mock-podcasts with Google’s NotebookLM – yet the wily business of persuasion still evades its claws. At this stage.

Rather than assembling rhetoric, it riffs. Emits sentences. Or plays the whataboutism card, presenting the opposite camps, picking neither. Of course, I could have ordered the chatbot to build a pro- or anti-essay, but still, the intangible guile is missed. The intellectual dance we call “opinion writing”.

Despite your doubts, this is David Astle talking. As that’s our new caveat, a Turing vow we need to pledge to soothe the sceptic. Besides, would ChatGPT spend three paragraphs outlining its own limitations? Plausibly. If you asked it. Just as the tool’s own denunciation could be written in the style of Kathy Lette. But I swear this is me, the name on the tin.

That said, despite the initial deceit, this entire column is mine in spirit. While I’ve never written about ghost-writers, I have spent 40 years showcasing my words, only for a whiz-new factory to convert them into bespoke sausages. Yes, reader, here comes your argument.

Because if I just edit the robot’s opening blurt, ditch its semicolon, then the human may emerge. Or make that the cyborg, a furtive hybrid of robot and writer engineered by this subjective slant I’m now adding, using AI as much a vassal as vessel.

Or relying on the words of my inhuman accomplice, and how it had wrapped its original brief: “So is ghost-writing ethical? As with most human enterprises, it depends on disclosure and intent.” Discuss.

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