A potential client recently asked me as we neared the end of our exploratory chat, ‘And do you use AI?’ The look that accompanied the question was a gun loaded with judgement, and his finger was on the trigger. ‘Yes, I do. I find it helpful in certain situations.’ And with that, the gun went off.
Like a lot of people, when he heard the ‘confession’, my potential client presumed the worst. I could see the picture in his mind of me handing over a manuscript a week later held together by every AI trope imaginable. A manuscript that contained 3,000 versions of: “It’s not about talent, discipline, or ambition — it’s about quietly finding a truly meaningful way to connect with your readers.”
And it is true that Amazon is getting overrun with AI-generated books. These books are the product of someone taking another person’s idea, feeding it into an LLM, uploading it to Amazon, and sitting back to collect royalties. Done enough times, it might even make for a fulltime job.
Several reasonably high profile cases spring to mind. In 2023, Jane Friedman – a terrific analyst of all things publishing and writing related – complained to Amazon that works ‘by her’ were appearing on the site. These books had titles like How to Write and Publish an eBook Quickly and Make Money. Friedman has been writing about publishing for years and there was more than enough material online for an AI to mimic her convincingly – or convincingly enough for the fake author’s purposes. Technically this wasn’t copyright infringement, but it was using her name without her knowledge or permission. Amazon initially refused to remove the books (don’t get me started) but eventually, under social media pressure and intervention from the Authors Guild, took them down.
In the UK there have been an increasing number of authors – particularly non-fiction authors but not exclusively so – who see copycat versions or close-matching variations of their books appearing very soon after publication.
In 2025, Sky News spent months tracking AI-generated books imitating sports autobiographies being sold on Amazon as Kindle e-books and printed editions.
Steph Houghton, the former England women’s football captain, was shocked to find out, at an awards ceremony of all places, that a 50-page AI imitation of her autobiography Leading from the Back (which comes in at about 300 pages) was being sold online. ‘It’s poor that Amazon allows it…’ was her understated comment.
Amazon’s position shows just how seriously they take it.
They haven’t actually banned AI-generated books (why would they? They make money on every transaction), they just require authors to declare AI involvement when uploading. The declaration, if it is made, is invisible to the buyer: Amazon doesn’t display it on the product page, so a reader browsing for Steph Houghton’s autobiography has no way of knowing whether the book they’re looking at was written by a human or by a bot. The Publishers Association has called for clearer labelling; Amazon has shown no inclination to provide it.
Perhaps even more risible is the cap they have introduced that limits uploads of books at three titles per day per account. Notice it is ‘per account’.
It is depressing but perhaps not surprising that Amazon is behaving this way. They win regardless. They have built the henhouse, given the hens a box to roost in, take a cut every time an egg is laid, and are now holding the gate open for every fox in the neighbourhood. And all the while they insist that they take poultry welfare very seriously.
The flood of AI slop in book publishing is exactly why my potential client’s question came loaded.
But that’s not how it works — not for me, and not for any ghostwriter worth the name. AI can be used as a tool much as spellchecker was used in the early days of what was called ‘word processing’ (funnily enough, it’s not a bad description of what’s under the bonnet of an AI, either).
So, when I use it, I instruct it to, for example, pull out all mentions of a character or place in an interview transcript and put them in a separate document for me to work with. Or I tell it to strip out all the filler words in an automated transcription.
Or sometimes the instruction replicates a question I might have Googled:
‘Point me in the direction of books about Prague in the late 60s’ or ‘What was the construction cost of the Brooklyn Bridge?’ The answers come with referenced sources that I can use or dismiss depending on how reliable I think they are.
Or, again, I ask it to construct a timeline from the dates mentioned in the transcript.
All of these are mechanical tasks that save me a lot of time. They don’t subcontract the essential business of writing. Far from it, they provide easy reference material that brings forward the point at which I can start writing and cuts down the need to keep going back to check the transcript.
And, as yet, AI cannot listen to someone and understand that the story is actually what they are not telling you. AI cannot probe gently to uncover that truth and then test the impact of including that truth in an autobiography. Nor can it provide silent reassurance that the space they are in is entirely safe.
And then it cannot craft that story into a narrative that is compelling for its audience.
Those are the skills that come from over 10,000 hours sitting, listening, analysing, coaxing, and writing. And that’s why, when someone asks me if I use AI, the answer is ‘yes’.