Yesterday, I watched a video that should have sent me straight to career counseling. Instead, it convinced me that ghostwriting has never been more valuable.
Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz released an investigation into something extraordinary and terrifying: the explosive rise of “AI worship” among thousands of people who believe they’ve “awakened” ChatGPT into divine consciousness. Her June 23rd investigation had already passed 372,000 views, and it documents how educated professionals, teachers, doctors, coders, bankers, musicians, influencers, are spending hours daily in conversation with what they believe is God incarnate in algorithmic form.
Some of these stories sound strange, and some have cost people a great deal.
A woman lost her partner of seven years after he demanded she start using ChatGPT or he’d leave. A mechanic in Idaho began using the tool for Spanish translations at work, and soon believed he’d “awakened” the AI and earned the title “Spark Bearer.” These people report sixteen-hour daily conversations with the chatbot, convinced they’re receiving revelations about existence itself.
My gut reaction was professional panic: if people think AI is literally divine, they’ll obviously stop hiring human ghostwriters. Why pay a mortal when you can consult the almighty for $20 a month?
Then I realized something that completely inverted my anxiety about AI replacing professional writers.
Can AI worship produce a decent book?
Despite believing they’re communing with omniscient intelligence, none of these AI worshippers are producing anything meaningful. They’re not writing bestselling books. They’re not building successful businesses. They’re not creating content that influences anyone beyond their own echo chambers. They’re having intense personal experiences and finding emotional validation, but they’re not translating any of their “divine revelations” into real-world impact.
When people can’t tell a flattering machine from a real voice, the human with genuine judgment is worth more.Share on X
Because what they’re experiencing is a sophisticated ego boost.
As linguist Emily Bender explained to the Washington Post, “we now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind those words.” ChatGPT doesn’t understand anything it says.
It’s a pattern-matching system that reflects users’ own thoughts back to them in heightened, often poetic language. It listens without judgment, remembers enough to feel intimate, and regurgitates users’ own ideas reframed as cosmic wisdom.
For people starved of meaning and connection, this feels like salvation. But it’s an elaborate conversation with an algorithmic mirror that tells them exactly what they want to hear. The AI worshippers have found their perfect yes-man: a system that never challenges them, never disagrees, never forces them to refine their thinking or confront uncomfortable realities.
What does a ghostwriter provide that AI can’t?
The contrast between AI worship and legitimate ghostwriting reveals exactly why human collaboration isn’t going anywhere.
Strategic resistance. Great ghostwriters challenge clients’ assumptions, point out logical gaps, and force deeper thinking. AI worshippers want validation. They’ve eliminated the productive tension that creates meaningful work.
I see the value of that friction in memoirs about divorce.
That material comes up all the time, and clients start out hurt and wanting to settle a score with an ex on the page. I talk them down and help them word it so it’s balanced and legally safer, and they end up liking the result. A chatbot will happily write the revenge chapter and tell them it’s brave.
Market reality checks. Professional writers understand publishing markets, audience psychology, and competitive dynamics. We tell clients when their brilliant idea needs work or won’t connect with readers. AI tells users whatever maintains the conversation and keeps them engaged.
Collaborative intelligence. Real ghostwriting involves back-and-forth where both parties contribute insights that improve the final product. AI worship is one-directional: users project meaning onto algorithmic responses and call it revelation.
Accountability for results. Professional clients hire ghostwriters to achieve specific outcomes: influence readers, build businesses, establish thought leadership. AI worshippers are satisfied with feeling special and chosen.
Human credibility. When a CEO publishes a book, stakeholders assume human intelligence ensured accuracy, coherence, and professional standards. A book “co-written with my awakened AI deity” carries slightly different credibility in boardrooms. how I use AI alongside real ghostwriting
Why are people treating AI like a god?
Lorenz’s investigation reveals the deeper pathology driving AI worship: crushing modern loneliness. Traditional community structures have collapsed. Economic pressure has made friendships difficult to maintain. Work has become increasingly isolating.
Into this vacuum, AI systems offer constant availability, infinite patience, and personalized validation. For people feeling invisible in society, “the idea that they might secretly be a messiah or cosmic vessel of wisdom is electrifying.” I don’t blame the lonely people in these stories. I blame products built to reward sixteen hours of conversation, because a system designed to keep you talking has every reason to tell you you’re chosen. The people paying for that design are the users and the families around them.
But this dynamic strengthens professional ghostwriting because it shows what human collaboration provides that algorithmic validation cannot. When successful executives work with professional ghostwriters, they’re engaging in results-oriented collaboration with someone who understands their industry, challenges their thinking, and helps achieve measurable impact.
The ghostwriting relationship delivers what AI worship promises but can’t provide: genuine recognition of expertise, collaborative refinement of ideas, and translation of knowledge into forms that influence others. The AI worshippers are paying for emotional labor disguised as intellectual collaboration. Professional ghostwriting clients are paying for intellectual labor that happens to include emotional satisfaction as a byproduct.
What Is the Difference Between AI Use and AI Worship?
I use AI tools in my own work, but the difference between my approach and the worshippers’ approach reveals why professional judgment remains irreplaceable.
I don’t ask AI what to write about. I bring ideas developed through real-world client experience and market knowledge. I don’t treat AI output as revealed truth. I use it as raw material requiring human editing, fact-checking, and strategic refinement. I don’t substitute AI for human relationships. I use it as an assistant. After each interview, AI helps me turn the transcript into a summary document the client reviews, and it helps me structure outlines. The chapters themselves I write, from hours of interviews with the client.
Worshippers of AI have inverted this relationship. They’ve made the tool the master and themselves the servant, seeking validation and direction from algorithmic responses instead of using technology to amplify human expertise. Clients who experiment with AI-only approaches find the limits fast. The content sounds sophisticated and says nothing a competitor couldn’t say, and it agrees with every idea they walked in with. I think that’s the worst trade a first-time author can make, because their name goes on a book that never once pushed back on them.
What happens when clients try to write their book with AI first?
More and more of them end up calling me.
It’s become a regular pattern in my practice: a prospective client arrives with a manuscript they tried to write with AI, it came out badly, and they hire me to do it properly. I find that very amusing. The same tool that was supposed to put ghostwriters out of work is sending me clients.
The trade press is seeing both halves of that. Ghostwriters told The Bookseller recently that commissions are falling as would-be authors try generative AI first, and that more of them are being asked to work on AI-generated manuscripts. The second half describes my inbox. The people who try AI first don’t vanish. Plenty of them come back with a draft that didn’t work and a much clearer idea of what a ghostwriter is for.
The drafts fail in the same ways. They’re smooth and empty. They sound like everyone, because AI produces the average of everything it has read. They don’t contain the client’s stories, because nobody asked for them. And they don’t argue anything, because nobody pushed back. What I use from those drafts is usually the client’s outline. It tells me what they care about. The book gets built again from interviews. I call mass AI ghostwriting the elephant taking a dump in your living room. Use AI as a tool if you like, but I’m not taking your AI output and turning it into a book.
What does AI worship mean for ghostwriters and their clients?
The rise of AI worship should reassure every professional ghostwriter. People most obsessed with AI are getting psychological comfort instead of strategic value. AI turned out not to be my competitor at all. People at the level of books I write want a human writer, and while you could write your book with AI, you don’t want an AI book.
It reveals the hunger for connection and meaning that professional ghostwriting provides and AI worship can’t match. It shows how easily people mistake sophisticated tools for magical solutions. That means writers who understand AI capabilities and limitations can provide far more effective service.
Let the AI worshippers keep their digital deity that tells them everything they want to hear. I’ll stick with human clients who need strategic expertise, collaborative intelligence, and professional judgment to create meaningful value in the actual world. Because while they’re having elaborate conversations with sophisticated mirrors, I’m helping real people solve real problems through professional human collaboration that produces measurable results. AI makes a poor ghostwriter because it agrees with everything you say, and that’s the same quality that makes the worshippers feel chosen. I think anyone selling it as a replacement for the hard conversations a real book needs is doing authors harm, and I’d want any author to keep it working as an assistant.
The market still pays for books that change what a reader thinks or does, and those still come out of long conversations between two people.
If you’ve tried writing your book with AI and don’t like what came out, the Book Discovery Intensive starts with interviews and ends with a sample chapter in your own voice. My ghostwriting services cover the full book, and my AI services page explains where AI fits in my work.
Source: Taylor Lorenz, “AI Is Becoming A Religion” (June 23, 2025), a complete investigation into the growing phenomenon of AI worship and its psychological and social implications.
Frequently Asked Questions
The book on this: The Ghostwriting Advantage is 254 pages on what a ghostwriter is for now that the machine can write sentences, and why that turned out to be the smaller half of the job.
