Ghostwriting, Artificial Intelligence, and Academic Writing

First, have your notes accessible from last class. You’ll be adding to them today.

As a profession, ghostwriters serve many needs. According to Brandt, a ghostwriter could be “a researcher, knowledge producer, and/or knowledge analyst” for leaders and established professionals (38). Private citizens often hire ghostwriters to supplement skills or knowledge they don’t have, as when a person might hire a lawyer to submit a petition to a court.

• Can you think of other examples of ghostwriting?
• Is ghostwriting a legitimate form of writing?
• Do you think ghostwriting is plagiarism? Why or why not?

You want to add some of your answers to the above questions to your notes from last class.

Let’s Play

All this talk of power and authority in ghostwriting (I think) relates to our current cultural reaction to writing with AI. Today, I’m inviting you to play around with large language models (LLM) and see what happens. Plug this prompt–“rewrite Ariana Grande’s No Tears Left to Cry as a legal brief” (or something similar that asks to move from one genre to another)–into one of the following LLMs:

• Copilot
• ChatGPT
• Gemini
• DeepAi

You’re welcome to use another LLM & create a different prompt, but you must share your source & your prompt with the class.

What happened? Build on your notes by considering the following:

• Compare ghostwriting to writing with AI. How do both of these ways of composing disrupt authorship and agency?

Brandt poses an interesting question in light of current technologies of writing. She identifies that “old-fashioned writing legitimizes power, largely through its taxing effort, its call on a person’s time, attention, judgement, and skill, and it’s capacity to strengthen and improve those who take it up” (Brandt 47). Last class, you did some writing about how ghostwriting aligns with or contradicts your ideas of power and authority in writing. Today, you shared power and authority with an LLM, in effect using AI as a kind of ghostwriter. Your homework–your next blog post–asks you to reflect on all of these collaborative writing practices.

HOMEWORK

Write a blog post (minimum 300 words) in response to the below question and feel free to engage some of your earlier writing from last class. You may reflect on your experience writing with AI, and you must cite Brandt or Cooper in your response. Please title your blog to reflect the content of your writing.

As writing changes, what happens to the legitimacy of the power that “old-fashioned writing” had (Brandt 47)? As writing in the world becomes increasingly collaborative, involving both human and nonhuman agents, how does agency change?

Work Cited

Brandt, Deborah. The Rise of Writing. Cambridge UP, 2014.