---
title: "AI is a Terrible Ghostwriter"
description: "In the age of slop, readers test authenticity. I lace posts with subliminal sincerity — the ampersand, neologisms, grammatical plumes, mimicry. Then AI edits it all. I've never had a ghost writer, but I did have a human editor. Was that any different?"
categories: ["writing","AI"]
keywords: ["AI writing","authenticity","ghost writing","editing with AI","AI slop","polysyndeton","Cormac McCarthy"]
date: 2026-08-03
lastmod: 2026-08-04
canonical_url: https://www.tomtunguz.com/ai-ghost-writing/
author: "Tomasz Tunguz"
---


{{< email_image src="wgtsigya7maiuoeeda1a" alt="A human author & a robot at a shared writing desk, harmonizing over a single page — the robot's voice quietly swelling into the author's" width="540" height="304" >}}

"Is this AI written? … I'm sure this is AI written. … This is a different tone from your usual."

I receive notes like this with increasing frequency. At first, I thought they were a playful game of cat & Claude.

But now I suspect it's something deeper.

In the age of slop, readers test authenticity.

Post-AI, I'm deliberately lacing posts with subliminal sincerity. Unique forms of punctuation, like my affinity for the ampersand[^ampersand] & neologisms, novel words like "mid-model-market"[^neologism] & the deliberate use of grammatical plumes: sentence fragments, dangling participles, & rhetorical devices[^rhetoric] & mimicking authors, like Cormac McCarthy's long, winding sentences[^mccarthy].

[^ampersand]: [The Missing Letter from the English Alphabet](https://tomtunguz.com/the-missing-letter/)
[^neologism]: [Yeltsin in the AI Aisle](https://tomtunguz.com/yeltsin-in-the-ai-aisle/)
[^rhetoric]: [Words Like Loaded Pistols](https://tomtunguz.com/words-like-loaded-pistols/)
[^mccarthy]: See *Blood Meridian* (1985).
[^dek]: [The Hed, the Dek, the Lede, and the Nut Graf](https://www.bmon.co.uk/2019/04/the-hed-the-dek-the-lede-and-the-nut-graf/)

In the early 2010s, I hired an editor to help me with my blog posts, asking him to critique each one like an AP English teacher.

Now, AI has become my editor, teaching me about stronger deks & nut grafs[^dek]. Its recollection of arcane statistical analyses is near flawless, & its rigor has earned it a seat as my resident quant.

Great editors suppress their own voices to favor the author's. Ghost writers harmonize their own voice with the author's.

The problem with AI as a ghost writer: everyone uses the same ghost writer. AI's voice isn't the author's.

Too much AI & the piece loses its musicality to a clanker's monotonous internal tune.

AI is a poor ghost writer, but a great editor.