How Many Writers Already Use AI?
Writers love arguing about AI. Scroll through any writing forum and you’ll find people ready to throw punches over whether ChatGPT is a miracle tool or a plagiarism machine. The problem? Most of these fights happen without data. Two major industry surveys cut through the noise. “AI and the Writing Profession” from Gotham Ghostwriters surveyed working writers about their AI habits and concerns. “A Complete Study of Business Book ROI” from AuthorROI examined 301 published business authors to find out what makes books profitable.
I read both with a ghostwriter’s bias and came away with opinions on both sides. AI is a tool, and the writers treating it like one are doing fine. The ones letting it do the writing are headed for trouble, and so are the freelancers whose clients have decided a chatbot is good enough.
Six out of ten writing professionals use AI tools at least sometimes. One in four use them daily. That’s not early adopters anymore. That’s mainstream.
The heaviest users work in thought leadership (84%), PR and communications (73%), and content marketing (73%). Journalists and fiction authors lag behind, with fewer than half using AI regularly. Copy editors barely touch it. Only 2% qualify as advanced users.
What counts as “using AI”? Mostly research and ideation. Writers use it for suggesting titles (72%), search (71%), brainstorming (68%), and finding the right word when their brain refuses to cooperate (68%). Only 7% have published AI-generated text directly. The rest treat it like a very fast, occasionally stupid research assistant. If you want to see how that workflow functions for fiction, the brainstorming and AI-assisted writing guide covers the process.
That 7% is the number I care about. Using a machine to brainstorm titles is a tool doing a tool’s job. Publishing what it spits out with your name on top is where writers get hurt, because readers can feel prose nobody cared about, and they stop reading.
Does Using AI Change What Writers Earn?
This is where it gets interesting. Advanced AI users have a median income of $120,100. Nonusers? $73,100. That’s a 64% difference.
Correlation isn’t causation. Maybe higher earners adopt new tools faster. Maybe AI skills open doors to better-paying clients. Maybe the confidence to experiment with new technology signals other marketable traits. The survey doesn’t prove AI makes you rich, and I’d distrust anybody who waves this chart around to sell you a subscription. What it does show is that writers who earn more tend to use AI more intensively.
Three quarters of AI users say it makes them more productive, reporting an average 31% improvement. 43% said their writing quality improved. Only 9% thought it got worse.
Writers Are Scared and Angry
Share of writers who share each concern about AI, per the Gotham Ghostwriters survey.
The productivity gains come with existential dread. 91% of writers worry about AI hallucinating factual errors into their work. Eight out of ten are concerned about AI training on copyrighted text without permission. 79% fear corporate leaders will use AI to replace human writers entirely.
These aren’t paranoid fantasies. Four in ten freelancers and small agency workers say AI has already reduced their income. One in four writers has considered quitting the profession because of AI. 73% believe opportunities for writers will deteriorate over the next five years.
Those freelancers are the ones I worry about. A client who buys blog posts by the word will always find something cheaper, and a chatbot is the cheapest option anyone has ever offered. The writers who come through this will be the ones selling judgment, interviews and voice, the parts a client can’t get from a prompt. One speechwriter called AI a “sociopathic plagiarism machine.” Fiction writers who don’t use AI are, according to the survey, “emphatically and uniformly angry about it.”
The corporate apocalypse hasn’t arrived yet. Only one in ten writers at corporations and agencies have seen colleagues laid off due to AI. But the fear is obvious, and for freelancers competing on price, the damage is already happening.
How divided are writers about AI?
The pattern the research keeps finding is this: how you feel about AI depends almost entirely on how much you use it.
Among heavy AI users, 57% say it’s a positive force for the profession. Among nonusers, that number drops to 3%. Three percent.
Those who use AI most swear by it. Those who don’t use it fear it. There’s almost no middle ground, and the split tracks attitude far more than facts or logic. I find the tribalism tiresome on both sides, because the people cheering and the people cursing are mostly arguing about a tool neither camp has tested fairly.
Both sides share one concern: 80% of all writers worry that AI contributes to boring writing. Apparently everyone agrees the robots are making things duller, even if they disagree about everything else. That concern isn’t unfounded: AI has real strengths and real limitations, and knowing which is which is the difference between a useful tool and a crutch.
Does ghostwriting still pay in the AI era?
The AuthorROI study looked at a different question: what makes business books profitable? The median ghostwritten book was four times as profitable as other books. Authors averaged $1.24 in revenue for every dollar spent on their books. Books with launch PR teams had a median gross profit of $55,500. Those with a strong revenue strategy broke $96,000. Book sales alone rarely justify the investment. Median sales were 4,600 for traditionally published books, 1,600 for hybrid-published books, and 700 for self-published books. Those numbers don’t scream “retirement fund.”
The real money comes from what the book unlocks. Speaking fees, consulting clients, workshops, brand authority. Among authors with books out six months or more, 18% reported $250,000 or more in total income from their book projects. Speaking, consulting, and workshops generated far more revenue than royalties ever did.
89% of authors said writing a book was a good idea.
More than 90% reported nonmonetary benefits like credibility and brand positioning. I tell every client the same thing before we start: you’re very unlikely to earn the fee back through book sales. The return comes from using the book as the foundation of your marketing, and these numbers back that up.
What Do These Numbers Mean for a Working Writer?
If you’re ignoring AI because you think it’s a fad, the data suggests you’re swimming against a strong current. Most of your peers already use it. The highest earners use it intensively. Productivity gains are real and measurable.
You’re not alone if you’re worried about AI replacing writers. The concerns are widespread and legitimate. Freelancers are already feeling the squeeze. The long-term outlook makes most writers pessimistic. Recalibrate your expectations if you’re writing a book to get rich from royalties. Book sales disappoint almost everyone. The value is in positioning, credibility, and the opportunities that follow.
The ROI data supports the investment if you’re considering a ghostwriter. Ghostwritten books outperform on profitability. The numbers work if you treat the book as a business asset instead of a standalone product.
The AI debate will keep raging, and I’m tired of it being fought with slogans. Use the tool for what it’s good at, keep the writing human where a reader can tell the difference, and judge the result by whether anybody finishes the book. The 80% who worry AI makes writing boring have found the main problem, and neither side of the argument has done much about it.
Frequently Asked Questions
The book on this: The Birth of the Augmented Human is 212 pages on what the tools do for the people who use them properly. That’s the context the survey numbers need to mean anything.
