I’ve ghostwritten for most of my career.
Product launches, explainers, positioning docs, the kind of content that lives on a company site and not in a portfolio. Sometimes my name was attached. Often it wasn’t. That never bothered me. I understood the trade, I knew what I was signing up for, and I was fine with the arrangement. Ghostwriting, when it’s explicit, is a choice I’m generally very ok with.
That’s why I was surprised by how strange it felt to open a piece of work recently and recognize it immediately, but not see my name. The structure. The framing. The way the argument unfolded. It felt familiar in a way that went beyond topic or tone. And in this case, it was a piece I’d intended to have bylined to myself.
Let’s be clear: Nothing dramatic had happened. There was no moment of wrongdoing. This work existed at a company I was no longer associated with, and thus had moved forward without me. That’s a normal thing in corporate environments. Still, I found myself sitting with an unexpected question: if I’ve always been comfortable ghostwriting, why did this feel different?
I don’t think the answer is just about credit.
Words vs. judgment
Ghostwriting, at least the way it’s worked for most of my career, is mostly about words. You’re lending your ability to articulate someone else’s ideas clearly. You’re helping shape a message that belongs, by agreement, to another voice. The boundaries are clear. The exchange is understood.
What felt different here wasn’t about sentences. It was about thinking.
When I look back at the work I’ve done over the years, the part that feels most “mine” has never been the copy itself. It’s the judgment underneath it. Deciding what matters and what doesn’t. Choosing which tradeoffs are worth explaining and which aren’t. Structuring an argument so it actually lands with the people it’s meant for (and with Google, must not forget the gods of SEO). That’s the work that takes time, context, and experience. It’s also the work that tends to disappear first when content gets passed around.
When words get easier, thinking gets more valuable
AI complicates this in a way that’s subtle but important.
I use AI constantly. It’s a rubber wall and research partner that I wouldn’t give up. I don’t think it’s the villain in this story. But it does change the texture of authorship. When drafting gets easier, faster, and more collaborative, it becomes tempting to treat writing as raw material instead of a record of judgment. Words are generated, revised, smoothed, and rearranged until the original thinking behind them becomes hard to trace.
Here’s the thing: when the words part got easier with AI, it almost made the thinking part more valuable. It made me more precious about it. When I see a post that’s organized in the way I decided it should be, using mostly words I prompted the AI to generate, I feel a sense of ownership. Not because I wrote the sentences, but because I made the decisions that shaped them.
In that environment, it’s easy to forget that someone had to decide what the piece was actually about in the first place.
AI can help assemble language. It can reorganize, summarize, and polish. What it can’t do is care. It can’t decide why one framing is more honest than another, or why a particular tradeoff deserves airtime. That kind of judgment still comes from people. When that contribution gets flattened into “just a draft,” something gets lost. And paradoxically, as AI makes words easier to generate, that thinking work becomes more valuable, not less. Which makes it feel more precious when it goes unrecognized.
The gray zone of corporate transitions
Corporate transitions make this even murkier.
When someone leaves a company, work that’s mid-flight often becomes no one’s work and everyone’s work at the same time. Drafts live on in shared folders. Context evaporates. Momentum takes over. The goal shifts from authorship to shipping. Again, this isn’t malicious. It’s operational. But it creates a gray zone where thinking survives without its thinker.
Legally, the company owns the output. Practically, someone else finishes it. Culturally, though, we haven’t really decided what we owe to the people who shaped the work before they left. Most teams don’t have norms for this, especially now that AI makes it even harder to see where one person’s contribution ends and another’s begins.
This isn’t just a writing problem
What keeps sticking with me is that this isn’t just a writing problem.
Designers, product managers, strategists, engineers — anyone whose job involves shaping ideas rather than just executing tasks — is going to run into this tension. As AI accelerates production, the invisible parts of creative labor become easier to overlook. The thinking happens early, quietly, and then gets buried under iterations.
I don’t have a clean answer for where the line should be. I’m not arguing that every piece needs perfect attribution or that companies should freeze work when someone leaves. I do think we need better norms. More intention. A clearer distinction between words and judgment, between output and authorship.
I’ve been fine letting my name disappear from work before. I’m still fine with that, most of the time. What surprised me was realizing that there are cases where the absence doesn’t feel like ghostwriting. It feels like erasure of the thinking itself.
And as AI becomes more embedded in how we work, that feeling is probably only going to get more common.
I’m still thinking about what that means.