Table of Contents
TL;DR: Ghostwriting mills are quietly generating client books with AI and charging professional rates. Protect yourself with four demands: a written AI policy in the contract, recorded interviews as the raw material, chapters delivered as written, and a writer with a verifiable public identity. My own AI policy is in writing: your book is written by me, AI serves as a checking tool only, and your material never trains anything.
Here is the question clients have started asking me in the last two years, usually somewhere in the second half of the first call, usually with a small apology attached: “How do I know you’re not just going to run my interviews through ChatGPT and send me the output?”
Stop apologizing for the question. It is the single most reasonable thing you can ask a ghostwriter in 2026, and the way a writer answers it tells you almost everything you need to know about who you are hiring.
Why the Fear Is Justified
Because it is happening. A lot.
The economics are obvious. A ghostwriting mill charging you $25,000 for a manuscript can pay a subcontractor $2,000 to produce it, and that subcontractor can produce it in a weekend by feeding your questionnaire into a language model and lightly editing what comes out. The mill pockets the difference. You get a book that reads like every other book produced the same way, because it was.
A written AI policy in the contract. A professional who writes will sign it without blinking. A mill will get vague, because the clause destroys their business model.Share on X
I have been hired more than once to fix these books. The clients paid full professional rates. What they received was competent, grammatical, structured, and completely dead. The tells are consistent: every chapter the same length, every section opening with the same rhythm, transitions that connect nothing to nothing, and a voice that belongs to no living person. One client described reading his own “memoir” as feeling like a stranger had summarized his life from his LinkedIn profile. That is what had happened, mechanically speaking.
The ghostwriting industry was already full of scams and mills before AI arrived. AI did not corrupt an honest industry. It handed the already-corrupt part of the industry a machine that manufactures plausible-looking product at near-zero cost. The dishonest operators did what dishonest operators do.
The Honest Answer About AI in My Work
Now the part where most ghostwriters get cagey, because the honest answer is not “I never touch AI.”
I use AI tools. I wrote an entire book about using them, and I have published more than forty handbooks teaching writers to use them without wrecking their work. Pretending the technology does not exist would be a strange position for someone with my catalog. So instead of a denial, you get a policy, and the policy goes in writing:
- ► Your book is written by me. The prose that carries your name comes out of my judgment, my craft, and our recorded conversations. Not out of a generation prompt.
- ► AI is a research and checking tool, not an author. Verifying a date, testing whether a chapter summary holds together, hunting for repetitive phrasing in my own drafts. The same category of work a spellchecker does, at a higher level.
- ► Your material is never used to train anything. Your interviews, your drafts, and your business information do not go into tools that retain or learn from them. Confidentiality does not have an AI exception.
- ► You can ask me at any point what was done and how. The process is not a black box. It is your book.
That policy exists because I believe what I wrote in AI never writes in your voice: the model produces the average of everyone, and the entire value of a ghostwritten book is that it sounds like exactly one person. A book that could have been generated is a book that did not need you, and a book that did not need you will not do anything for you.
What to Demand From Any Ghostwriter
Not just from me. From anyone you are considering. Four things, and none of them are unreasonable:
A book that could have been generated is a book that did not need you, and a book that did not need you will not do anything for you.Share on X
1. A written AI policy in the contract. Not a verbal assurance. A clause stating what AI tools may and may not be used for, and stating that the manuscript is the writer’s original work. A professional who actually writes will sign this without blinking. A mill will get vague, because the clause destroys their business model.
2. Recorded interviews as the raw material. A book built from ten hours of real conversation cannot be faked by a model, because the model was not in the conversation. If a “ghostwriter” wants to work from a written questionnaire instead of live interviews, ask why. Questionnaires are how you feed a prompt.
3. Chapters as they are written, not a manuscript at the end. Generated books arrive all at once because they are produced all at once. Real collaboration produces chapters in sequence, shaped by your corrections. The delivery pattern is itself evidence.
4. The writer on video, talking about your project. This one sounds trivial. It is not. The mills hide their writers because the writers are interchangeable or fictional. A real professional has a face, a history, a public record you can check. Mine includes a hundred-plus podcast appearances where you can hear me think in real time. Nobody generates that.
The Question Behind the Question
When a client asks whether I will secretly use AI, the real question underneath is older than the technology: am I going to pay professional money and get something less than professional work? AI just gave that fear a new face.
The answer has not changed either. You protect yourself the way clients have always protected themselves: verifiable identity, contractual specifics, work delivered in the open, and a track record you can check independently. I publish a Code of Ethics for Ghostwriters and my AI policy sits inside it, because the AI question is not separate from the ethics question. It is the current version of it.
If you want to test all of this before committing to a full engagement, that is what the Book Discovery Intensive exists for: ten hours of real interviews, a strategy report, and a 2,000-word sample chapter in your voice. Read the chapter. You will know within a page whether a human being wrote it, and whether that human being was listening to you.
That is the standard. Do not accept less from me or from anyone.
The Guides That Get Your Book Written, Published, and Sold
Four short, practical guides on writing, publishing, and selling your book, plus the occasional note when there's something worth your time. No fluff, no daily inbox clutter. Drop your email and they're yours.
We use MailerLite to manage our list and send these emails. Your address is used only to send you what you signed up for. We will not sell it, share it, or use it for anything else, and you can unsubscribe anytime.