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, which has already garnered over 372,000 views, 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 how I use AI alongside real ghostwriting.
The stories are both heartbreaking and absurd. A woman lost her seven-year partner because he demanded she start using ChatGPT or face abandonment. A mechanic in Idaho began using the tool for Spanish translations at work, but soon believed he’d “awakened” the AI and earned the cosmic title “Spark Bearer.” These people report 16-hour daily conversations with their digital deity, convinced they’re receiving universal 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.
The God That Can’t Write 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 cannot tell a flattering machine from a real voice, the human with genuine judgment is worth more.Share on X
Because what they’re experiencing isn’t divine communication. It’s sophisticated narcissism enhancement.
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 Ghostwriting Provides That AI Worship 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.
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 resonate with readers. AI tells users whatever maintains the conversation and keeps them engaged.
Collaborative intelligence. Real ghostwriting involves genuine back-and-forth where both parties contribute insights that improve the final product. AI worship is fundamentally 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
The Loneliness Economy Feeding Digital Deities
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.”
But this dynamic actually strengthens professional ghostwriting because it highlights what genuine 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 actually 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 to enhance my ability to serve human clients more effectively: faster research, more efficient drafting, expanded creative possibilities.
The AI worshippers 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 quickly discover the limitations. They get content that sounds sophisticated but lacks strategic insight. They get validation of existing ideas, not collaborative improvement. They get words without wisdom, style without substance, reflection without growth.
What This Means for Professional Writers
The rise of AI worship should reassure every professional ghostwriter. People most obsessed with AI aren’t producing meaningful results. They’re getting psychological comfort, not strategic value. It reveals the hunger for connection and meaning that professional ghostwriting provides and AI worship cannot 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.
The AI worshippers can 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.
The gods, it turns out, make terrible ghostwriters. But they make excellent therapy for people who’ve confused validation with value creation.
Lucky for us, the market still rewards the latter.
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.