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The debate about AI and writing has been loud and emotional. Writers who love it call it a productivity revolution. Writers who hate it call it a plagiarism machine. Everyone has opinions. Almost nobody has had data.
Now we do.
In 2025, Gotham Ghostwriters and Josh Bernoff conducted the first large-scale survey of professional writers on AI, reaching 1,481 respondents including 1,190 writing professionals and 291 fiction authors. Bernoff brought 30 years of survey analysis experience and previously led the 2024 Business Book ROI Study. The full report is available at gothamghostwriters.com/ai-writer.
I read the entire report. As someone who uses AI daily, has written 45 handbooks on AI-enhanced writing, and consults with businesses on AI implementation, the findings confirmed what I have been telling clients and fellow writers for over a year. The data tells a clear story, and it is not the story most people expect.
The Divide Is Real
The single most important finding in the study: how writers feel about AI depends almost entirely on how much they use it. Writers who use AI heavily think it is making them better at their jobs. Writers who do not use it think it is destroying the profession. There is almost no middle ground.
Among the most advanced AI users — the 15% who use it daily across six or more different tasks — 57% said AI is a positive force for the writing profession. Among nonusers, 3% said the same. That is not a disagreement. That is two completely different realities.
The advanced users report a median income of $120,100. Nonusers report $73,400. That is a $47,000 gap. You can argue about causation versus correlation, but the pattern is consistent across the data. The writers who use AI the most are earning the most and feeling the best about their careers. The writers who refuse to use it are earning less and feeling threatened.
What Writers Actually Use AI For
This is where the study gets interesting and where most of the public conversation about AI and writing gets it wrong. The fear is that writers are using AI to generate finished text and publish it without editing. The data says otherwise.
Only 7% of writing professionals use AI to generate text that gets published without significant editing. Less than 1% do that daily. The overwhelming majority use AI as a tool within their existing process, not as a replacement for it.
The most common uses: suggesting titles and headings (72% of AI users), replacing web search (71%), brainstorming (68%), finding the right words for a concept (68%), and research (63%). These are the tasks that slow writers down between the parts of the job that require actual expertise. AI handles the mechanical friction so the writer can focus on the thinking.
Among ghostwriters specifically — my profession — search is the dominant AI task. The study found that search is the only AI task more than three out of four ghostwriters embrace. This makes sense. Ghostwriting is built on understanding the client, not generating generic content. AI helps with research and organization. The strategic thinking, the interviewing, the narrative structure — that is still the ghostwriter.
One ghostwriter quoted in the study described uploading ten or more hours of transcribed client interviews into AI to help draft outlines and match the client’s natural voice and tone. That is essentially my process. The AI is not writing the book. The AI is helping me work with the raw material from interviews more efficiently so the final product is better and faster.
The Productivity Numbers
Three out of four AI-using writers said it makes them more productive. Among advanced users, 92% said so. The average productivity increase reported was 31%.
But productivity is not the whole story. Among advanced users, 59% said AI has improved the quality of their writing. Not just speed. Quality. They are producing better work faster. Only 9% of AI users said it made their writing worse.
This matches my experience exactly. AI does not make me a better writer in the sense of having better ideas or deeper insight. It makes me a better writer in the sense that I spend less time on tasks that do not require my expertise — research, organization, finding the right reference, checking consistency across a 60,000-word manuscript — and more time on the tasks that do.
The Fear Is Also Real
The study does not sugarcoat the other side. Writers who do not use AI are genuinely afraid, and some of their fears are justified.
Forty-five percent of freelancers reported reduced demand for their work due to AI. Forty percent said AI has reduced their income. Forty-three percent of all writing professionals know someone who has lost their job to AI. One in four writers has considered quitting the profession because of AI.
Among nonusers, 89% worry that corporate leaders will replace writers with AI. And 82% of nonusers predict that opportunities for professional writers will decrease in the next five years. Even among the overall writing population, 73% expect a decline.
These fears are not irrational. Companies are using AI to replace writers. The work that is disappearing first is the work that was most commoditized to begin with: generic blog posts, SEO content, basic marketing copy. Content that never required deep expertise is being automated because it can be.
But the study also shows that only 10% of writers working in corporations and agencies have actually seen colleagues laid off due to AI. The perception of job loss is running far ahead of the reality. The writers losing work are disproportionately those doing commodity work that was already undervalued.
What This Means for Ghostwriting
Sixty-eight percent of book ghostwriters in the study use AI. That is higher than journalists (44%) but lower than thought leadership writers (84%) or PR professionals (73%). Ghostwriters are adopting AI selectively, using it where it accelerates their process while keeping the human elements — interviewing, strategic positioning, narrative craft — firmly in their own hands.
One ghostwriter in the study said something I hear constantly from peers: “I’m frustrated that potential clients think it is a replacement for human writers.” This is the real challenge. The threat to ghostwriters is not that AI will write better books. It will not. The threat is that clients will believe AI can write their book and skip the ghostwriter entirely.
They will learn the hard way that it cannot. AI cannot interview you for ten hours to find the stories that make your book compelling. It cannot call your clients to capture transformation narratives. It cannot structure 60,000 words into a narrative that keeps a reader engaged from introduction to conclusion. And as the Gotham ROI Study showed, ghostwritten books generate four times the revenue of other books. The human expertise is where the value lives.
But ghostwriters who refuse to use AI will fall behind ghostwriters who use it. The income data is clear. The productivity data is clear. AI is a tool that makes good ghostwriters better and faster. Refusing to use it is not a principled stand. It is a competitive disadvantage.
The Concerns Everyone Shares
One area where AI users and nonusers agree: the problems are real.
Ninety-one percent of all writing professionals are concerned about hallucinations. This is the biggest risk in AI-assisted writing. AI generates plausible-sounding content that is factually wrong, and it does so with complete confidence. Any writer using AI who is not fact-checking every claim is producing unreliable work. I have seen this in my own practice and I have written extensively about it. AI hallucination is not a minor inconvenience. It is the single biggest danger in AI-assisted writing.
Eighty-one percent are concerned about AI being trained on copyrighted content without permission. Eighty percent are concerned that AI is contributing to bland, boring writing. These are legitimate concerns that the industry needs to address.
And here is the stat that should concern everyone who cares about quality: 80% of writing professionals worry that AI is contributing to the trend of text that is more bland and boring. This is because most people using AI are publishing what it generates without significant human intervention. The 7% who publish AI text without editing are creating a flood of generic, voiceless content that is degrading the overall quality of everything readers encounter.
The writers who use AI well — as a tool within a human-driven process — are producing better work. The writers and non-writers who use AI as a replacement for thinking are producing garbage. Both things are true simultaneously, and the study captures both.
Where This Goes
The study paints a profession in transition. The writers who adapt will earn more, produce more, and find more opportunities. The writers who refuse to engage with AI will earn less and watch their market shrink. The writers who use AI as a crutch instead of a tool will produce low-quality work that damages their reputation.
The path forward is what I practice every day and what I teach in my AI consulting work: use AI for what it does well, keep your expertise firmly in control of the process, fact-check everything, and never let the tool replace the thinking. And if you are writing a book, do not write the manuscript with AI. Use it for research, outlines, brainstorming, and organization. Write the book yourself or hire a ghostwriter. The data now confirms this is not just good advice. It is the strategy producing the best financial and professional outcomes for writers across the industry.
If you are a writer figuring out how to integrate AI into your process, or a business leader trying to understand what AI means for your content strategy, start with a conversation. My AI-Enhanced Writer’s Library covers the practical side in detail across 45 handbooks.
Data referenced from “AI and the Writing Profession: A Comprehensive Survey & Analysis” by Gotham Ghostwriters and Josh Bernoff, WOBS LLC (2025). The study surveyed 1,481 writing professionals and fiction authors.