Ghost Writing: On AI Before AI

An essay tracing the pre-history of today's anxieties about AI writing argues that ghostwriting, a term first recorded in 1908, accustomed society to letting the intellectual labor behind words stay invisible. That habit of not asking who really wrote something, the author contends, shaped how people now approach writing with language generators such as Claude. The piece is an argument about historical continuity rather than a report of new findings: it presents ghostwriting's acceptance as the background against which current attitudes toward AI-assisted writing should be read.

Generated from reports · updated 59 min ago

Not enough continuous observations yet to draw a trend.