I just added a new page alongside my website’s Terms, Accessibility Guidelines, and other legal pages—but I wanted to highlight it here as well.
AI is a flashpoint topic in publishing and among authors, with people making strong stands and valid points on both sides of the issue of whether to use generative AI.
But, at a more nuanced level, most of us are using AI tools in our daily work and writing already. And each of us has to decide where the line is for us, personally.
I like writing. That’s why I became a writer.
So the instant I learned that Otter.ai could transcribe my interviews and save me 3-5 hours/week transcribing them myself, I jumped on it.
Because I like writing! I’d much rather spend my time writing than transcribing.
Same with using AI-based dictation, spell-checking, and search tools. Same with using Claude or ChatGPT as a brainstorming tool to bounce title or marketing ideas off of, or to analyze drafts and suggest ways to make them stronger.
I don’t use AI to generate drafts either for my own books or for those of clients, because that’s what I’m good at. But I will use it anywhere I can free up more time to spend writing.
Most of my clients are business owners and have no problem with this; however, I understand that some potential clients might. Which is why my goal is to have fully transparent conversations with my clients about the ways we both use AI in our work.
(Because I won’t edit AI slop into a draft and call it ghostwriting, or fight with someone who’s using ChatGPT as an advisor and pushing back on the thing they hired me to do. So I need to understand exactly how a client is using AI, too.)
All that to say, here’s the contents of my new AI Policy Page.
If you have any questions, please reach out.
AI Policy
Basically, I agree with the AI Guidelines and Statement of Principles put out by Gotham Ghostwriters (read them here). In particular, I believe that writing is a fundamentally human activity, and that telling our own stories is what creates real connections with our readers. I love the quirks and foibles of human-written work, and it saddens me to read work that was clearly AI-generated. You can sense the lack of soul.
That said, I do use AI as a tool at various stages in the ghostwriting process, and am fine with my clients using AI.
(I do not edit books that were purely written with AI, though. If your book doesn’t have a soul to start with, it’s far too hard to put it in. Also, there are too many copyright issues.)
Specifically, these are the ways that I use AI in my book coaching and ghostwriting business.
Utilitarian and Administrative Uses
- Transcribing audio interviews
- Dictation
- Checking spelling and grammar
- Cleaning up formatting or citations
- Reviewing text to identify inconsistencies, redundancies, and other flaws
Research, Analysis, and Collaboration
- Performing AI-augmented web search
- Producing extensive research reports
- Summarizing papers or other content for research purposes
- Summarizing of audio recordings
- Suggesting words or appropriate terminology (as a thesaurus)
- Using AI tools as thought partners in discovery, ideation, and brainstorming
- Compiling and querying repositories of relevant content
Generative uses
- Suggesting titles and headings
- Suggesting outlines
- Suggesting ways to reorganize text
- Cleaning up transcript sections that will be revised later