Ghost Writers: Generative AI, Intellectual Property, and the Trope of the Hidden Author

Grading concerns are converging with literary critical ones this weekend as I type less-than-patient messages to class members who wrote an analysis of an autobiographical sketch in which they misrepresent the topic, themes, events, and personages.

Thanks, ChatGPT, for that hallucination. Very much appreciated.

But intriguingly (one finds the silver lining), mystery fiction is also preoccupied, in this moment, with originality of authorship.

Take the excellent television series Only Murders in the Building. Throughout several season, multiple plots have addressed questions of intellectual property, authorship, and ownership of purloined and misused texts. It’s all very meta.

My current read, Sass Bischoff’s Sweet Fury, takes on similar questions: F. Scott’s (mis)use of Zelda’s real-life words; the authorship of a screenplay; the incorporation of Fitzgerald’s stories and language into a new work.

Can we, in the future, look forward to mystery novels and thrillers revolving around the use of gen AI?

Or–ever so much worse–written by gen AI?

Apparently, we’re already living in that world. Librarians warn that slim and slimmer library dollars are being spent on craptastical ChatGPT-written books. Gen AI is also messing with library record-creation processes. I used to not get that excited about errors in metadata but thanks to a summer Digital Humanities Institute, now I know enough to be worried.

Shall we just hand over the planet to the chatbots, the sexbots, the chess-champion Deep Blue and others and head to Mars?

But a bit more about mystery fiction and the elusive and fascinating figure of the ghost writer, an evocative phrase.

I google “ghost writer in mystery fiction” and the first result I receive (and I do not know how to get rid of this) is the AI-generated definition.

Ironies abounding, I skim results and land on stories about (of course) James Patterson’s publishing empire. Here’s a depressing quotation for you: “One of the most famous writers doesn’t even really write. He is a creator, a director of books and his name has become less that of an author and more a brand.”

Remember Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, all so weirdly similar, whether you were accompanying Nancy to Larkspur Lane, or probing Dancing Dolls, or Whispering Statues? There was a similar syndicate at work there.

So maybe generative AI is just a stepped-up version of this kind of human creativity factory?

Or maybe it’s much worse.