Artificial Intelligence
AI and the Curse of Shallowness
AI writes like a brochure because it’s trained on averages. The shallowness is structural, not editable. Here’s the mechanism and the only real fix.
Working notes from a professional ghostwriter — on the craft of writing, the business of publishing, the psychology of authors, and the changing landscape of books in the AI era.
These articles come out of 113+ books authored and 54+ ghostwritten. They cover what's actually working in publishing right now, what isn't, how AI is changing the work for both writers and readers, what executives and founders get wrong when they try to write their own book, and what they get right when they bring in help.
No SEO listicles. No content-marketer fluff. Just observations from inside the work — written for people who care about books and the craft behind them.
AI writes like a brochure because it’s trained on averages. The shallowness is structural, not editable. Here’s the mechanism and the only real fix.
The doomers are wrong because AI already shipped. The hypers are wrong because AI doesn’t replace jobs. The boring third position is the only one that works.
Most AI skills lists are lists of tools. The tools change every six months. The skills underneath them don’t. Here are eight that will matter more in 2031.
A profile of a memoir client who uses AI more thoughtfully than most professionals half his age. Never lets it write a word. He’s the model for augmented humans.
The doomer framing is wrong. The hyper framing is wrong. The accurate version of the threat is the colleague who learned to use AI while you didn’t.
AI drift is the slow bending of long AI outputs away from the original ask. Here’s the mechanism, how to spot it, and the defense before it ships in production.
Six real client questions about AI and ghostwriting, and exactly what I tell them. The answers I’ve worked out across hundreds of conversations.
Every reason you’re telling yourself you don’t have to learn AI right now is a reason previous generations told themselves. They were all wrong then. You are now.
Customer service is the most public AI failure category in business. Here’s where AI wins, where it ruins everything, and the deployment checklist.
Four business decisions, two paths through each. The replace path bleeds savings back over 18 months. The augment path compounds. Here’s the math.
A 1980 SCADA system in Pascal solved the same problem every failed AI rollout in 2026 is failing to solve. The buzzword changes. The rule doesn’t.
Readers don’t reject books because a machine helped. They reject bad books. Here’s why AI writes hollow ones, and what actually makes a book worth reading.
Yes. Writing a book and knowing a subject are two different skills. You supply the expertise; the writer pulls it out in interviews and makes it readable.
Six failure modes, six industries, six real stories of AI breaking work that looked clean on the surface. Read all six and the pattern becomes obvious.
“Nobody reads anymore” is the most confident wrong thing said about books. Millennials read most, Gen Z prefers print, and your audience is still here.
AI is great at exactly the work most people are bored doing. Ten categories where the machine wins, what they share, and how to build the augmented human.
Naming names to settle a score is the fastest way to get sued and the surest way to write a book nobody respects. Here’s the better book hiding inside it.
You can’t fix AI prose by sprinkling humanity on top. The hollowness is structural. Here’s what’s really wrong and the only thing that fixes it.
What AI hallucination is, why it happens, what it invents most, and the only fix that prevents you from publishing fabricated facts under your own name.
Translating a book can cost nothing up front. After 46 in six languages, here’s when it’s worth it and the catch nobody warns you about.
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