AI is a hot topic, and my goal is to have fully transparent conversations with my clients about the ways we both use AI in our work.

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