In my last blog, I shared some resources to help us evaluate whether we’re using AI in a way that honors Christ. Today’s blog also touches on the subject of AI, but specifically related to writing books.
I know many people in ministry who are writers on the side, but I find in conversations that because of the demands of their ministries (often as pastors) they just don't have the time to carefully research and sift through or think through what they are writing about.
For all the years I’ve been writing I’ve known “content creators” who research and write on behalf of celebrities or pastors, without their names being recognized as the author. This is a moral problem for both the celebrity and the ghostwriter. If people put their own name to what they didn’t write, my belief is that it is simply lying. I’ve had people tell me it’s not lying if the ghost writers agree not to be mentioned, but in fact, lying with consent is still lying. Others have “editors” who do 90% of the work, including composing the first draft. They are not true editors but ghostwriters!
I firmly believe in editing, of course, and I don’t know what I would do without our staff editors, Stephanie and Doreen, as well as the editors who work for my publishers, but it seems obvious greater care should be exercised both in giving more credit to the people who’ve done the most work in creating a book, and that less credit or none at all be given those who have not done the work.
In 2002, I wrote on “The Scandal of Evangelical Dishonesty,” one component of which was the common practice of ghostwriting motivated by pride and financial profits. I got significant pushback on this, but years later many Christian writers joined me in speaking out against ghostwriting.
In 2020 I addressed this issue again, citing the excellent work of another author, Jenny Rough:
Angela Hunt received a call from an editor one day asking Hunt to ghostwrite a novel for a famous female Bible teacher. The teacher wouldn’t provide materials—or even the idea for the novel. “Anything with this celebrity’s name on it sold a lot of books, so the editor said, ‘Let’s get a novel with her name on it,’” Hunt recalls. Inventing characters and a plot felt different than bringing someone else’s message to the page. Hunt turned down the project. But the editor continued to shop around for a writer, and Hunt soon saw internet chatter about it in an online writing group.
Randy Alcorn was a member of that same group. Amid the banter, Alcorn posted a link to his article “Scandal of Evangelical Dishonesty” that included his views on ghostwriting. Hunt read it—and decided to stop ghostwriting unless she was named on the cover or title page. She realized it wouldn’t cost authors anything to reveal they had help. “It doesn’t belittle them to admit they’re not professional writers. Many secular writers refuse to ghostwrite for the same reason we Christian writers do—it’s not honest, and it disparages the work of the writer who has worked hard to learn the craft.”
Seventy-five writers from the group signed a letter and sent it to editors and publishers asking them to stop using ghostwriters for fiction. “We pretty much blanketed the Christian publishing industry,” Hunt says. The letter, finalized in January 2007, said ghostwritten novels are a form of false advertising and quoted Proverbs 20:10: “False weights and unequal measures—the Lord detests double standards of every kind.” Some publishers became defensive. Others promised to tighten practices.
But no industry standards exist.
Ghostwriting can be especially unpalatable in Christian publishing precisely because the book’s message often focuses on the Bible, a text that speaks against deceit. Karen Swallow Prior, the English professor, sees ghostwriting as misrepresentation plain and simple. “I don’t pretend to be a pastor giving sermons, so I don’t know why pastors pretend to be writers,” she says.
Alcorn makes the same point in one of his most popular books, Money, Possessions, and Eternity: “If we’re not telling the truth about who wrote the book—on the cover in large print—why should people believe what’s inside the book, in small print?”
In other cases, pastors or speakers turn in their sermon notes or transcripts to be crafted into a book, which is certainly better if the original work was actually theirs, not created for them by another person or by AI. I say better, since at least the named “writer” did the initial work. If that initial work is substantially produced by the named author, and an editor is simply proposing changes in wording, the editor should definitely be credited in the acknowledgments, and if 90% of the work was done by the named author, not the “editor,” that’s acceptable.
But when the named celebrity or pastor hasn’t done a substantial amount of the work (sometimes they don’t even look over the manuscript), and feels it was really his even though many of the best illustrations and the very best composition came from the “editor,” to me that is a major problem. There are Christian leaders going on podcasts and television being interviewed about “my book,” which in fact they did not write! When the predominant writer is not mentioned and someone who is listed as an author did a small percentage of the actual work, that is failing to acknowledge that readers have the right to know whether or not the celebrity wrote the book. If it’s “about” the celebrity and the actual author is made known, fine, there is no attempt at deception.
Where this hits the fan with artificial intelligence is that some believe if there is no human collaborator to receive credit, it’s fine for the user of AI to lay claim to being the writer—simply because he gave instructions to or asked questions of AI to produce a 30,000 word book on, let’s say, an evangelical theology of substitutionary atonement. Then he edits it (or not) and could conceivably “create” such a book in a matter of minutes, hours, or days. Or even if it took weeks or months, the primary “writer” would still be AI, not the person whose name is on the cover and is listed as the author on Amazon. As someone who has spent thousands of hours researching and writing articles and books for nearly 50 years, I know a bit about what writing is and is not! And I can guarantee you that having an idea for a book and handing it over to a person or a computer program is not even remotely the same as writing a book!
In this era of AI, I’m concerned that now everyone can have a ghostwriter without having to find and pay a ghostwriter! People can feed their thoughts or a few notes into AI and be delighted with how well written what comes out is. And yes, the results can be remarkable. But just as it was in the days of ghostwritten books that authors or publishers paid for, it is blatantly dishonest to take credit for what you did not write even when no other human wrote it!
A huge part of writing is the discipline of researching, writing, and word selection—all products of being created in God’s image and learning and applying and growing in actual human skills—which I fear will be largely lost. If you don’t do the hard work of research and thinking and putting your thoughts into words, it won’t just be taking shortcuts; it will rob you of the life skills that can only come in applying your mind to writing over the course of years.
If all of us could take shortcuts to become highly skilled runners, high jumpers, and pole vaulters, countless people surely would do so. We do not because we cannot. In contrast, the skills of a researcher and writer are every bit as real as that of a sprinter and marathoner, shot-putter and swimmer. AI cannot create a fake athlete, but it can be used, and is being used, to create fake researchers and writers!
A bestselling author friend and I were reminiscing recently in an email exchange about how things used to be so different in the industry, when both of our first books came out in the 1980s. He has good editors, as do I, but it all starts with what he writes. If the occasional sentence or paragraph is written by an editor as a proposed correction that the author gratefully accepts, that is one thing, but when entire chapters are written by editors—or by AI—they should be recognized as co-writers!
A further irony and complication is that by now I am relatively certain many career ghostwriters, including believers, are having AI compose their original drafts of books. Given the convoluted ethics of ghostwriting in the first place, why wouldn’t they? Now we don’t just have people claiming to have written books other people have written, but we have people taking credit for books not written by any human being at all!
How many people are now going to AI and saying, “Write for me a warm evangelical 25,000-word Christmas devotional, containing many biblical quotations, especially from the gospels and Isaiah, and also including quotations from Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Stott, Phillip Keller, and C. S. Lewis”? They come back to their computer later and begin to read “their” first draft!
Isn’t it reasonable for both Christians and non-Christians to be able to buy a Christian book with the confidence that the person identified on the book and publicized as the author actually wrote it?
I’ll ask what I asked 25 years ago: If we’re not telling the truth about who wrote the book—on the cover, in large print—why should people believe what we say inside the book, in small print?
