In early 2023, we realise we can’t beat AI, and it’s not going away, so we make a business decision to harness it.
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction
Confessions of a Content Marketer
Lie n., v., lied lying, -n. 1. a false statement made with intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood. 2. something intended or serving to convey a false impression.
There’s a lie inherent in what I do.
Day-to-day, I use my skills as a ghostwriter.
It’s not the glamorous side of the industry that ghostwriters are famously associated with. I don’t write autobiographies for celebrities. Much of what I write is content marketing: articles for professionals, published with their name on it.
I turn my hand to other things: website copy, brochures, eBooks, profiles, speeches, presentations. I write for people and organisations across industries. From financial services to real estate. HR, law and health.
I develop ideas, fine tune angles, choose formats, then write and edit to satisfy the seemingly endless demand for content to feed consumers and search engines.
As a business, we’re small: Just two of us, and a team of freelancers. As an industry, we fly under the radar. You need to know we exist or look hard to find us.
Clearly, I’m not in it for the glory – like other ghostwriters, I just take the paycheck and go back to writing poetry on the side.
Ghost writer n. one who does literary work for someone else who takes the credit.
Sometimes I feel like a stunt double, safely performing the tricks for an actor. Other times, I’m the understudy, never getting the main role. Most times I’m genuinely thankful that, while journalism is still reporting on its own long painful death, I’ve been gainfully employed for over a decade, working with words, and riding the wave of the content marketing boom.
Despite the sensation of selling-out on a higher ideal of writing, there are many benefits to ghostwriting. It’s not just the money. It’s a practice. You can slide away from the bad articles, the ones you don’t agree with, that feel flimsy, or you don’t want to be associated with, and no one will ever know. You can take on multiple new personas or styles. You can enjoy discovering a whole new topic then walk away. You can mess around with it too, subtly inserting your own interests, agenda, or point of view. It can be fascinating, fun and freeing. And you leave no trace of yourself.
With school reports that said ‘quiet achiever’, and awards for ‘attitude and industry’, perhaps I have the perfect personality to be a ghostwriter. Diligent, determined, never misses a deadline.
Writer n. 1. One who expresses ideas in writing. 2. One whose occupation is writing, as a journalist or author. 3. A composer of music. 4. One who paints or draws lettering; signwriter. 5. The writer, he who is writing this (referring to oneself in a piece of writing).
One afternoon in late 2022, I pulled the dusty Concise Dictionary off the bookshelf to find out if my own idea of writing matched with others. I’d already googled it several times but there were many dictionaries and definitions to choose from online. I decided to let the bookshelf have the final say. A microcosm, where time stands still.
For me, writing satisfies several of its dictionary definitions. It’s an activity and an occupation. Committing your thoughts to the page. A process to make sense of things. An art. An act. A skill. A form of communication. An inscription.
Online, Wikipedia is most diligent in its attempt to capture and contain what it involves. “Writing is a neuropsychological activity involving cognitive and physical processes,” it begins, before running off into the use of “writing systems to structure and translate human thoughts” into language.
It’s a form of analysis. A mental wrestle. Distilling thoughts and ideas. Creating meaningful connections and structure. Endless tiny decisions over what to say and how to say it. It’s more than simply arranging words on the page.
The dictionary feels current enough for my purposes, but on close inspection I realise it doesn’t even have an entry for ‘Internet’. Or ‘Email’. The imprint page says 1996. I remember buying it, while at university, on the recommendation of an off-beat creative writing lecturer who suggested it for writing inspiration rather than spell checking (alongside the Brewer Dictionary of Phrase and Fable). At over 1,100 pages it can’t have been cheap.
I must have thought I was making an investment in my future.
The writing is on the wall, an event presaging disaster, etc.
I read this sub-entry that appears under the definition of writing with curiosity. What do they mean, in this instance, by ‘etc’. It lacks the definitive precision I’d been looking for.
et cetera and others; and so forth; and so on. Abbrev.: etc
And so on. As 2022 ticks over into 2023, there’s a cloud hovering over my world. A new kid on the block. Like the dictionary, I will soon be out of date.
AI. Surprisingly, that is an entry in the ancient dictionary, minus the growing list of brand names like ChatGPT or Google Bard.
Artificial intelligence n. decision making computers.
If the internet killed print and journalism, and dictionaries, what will this do?
The question itself seems to be suspended in midair. Wavering between being inconsequential and fundamental. Tiresome and groundbreaking. The next chapter or, perhaps, the ending.
As my dictionary demonstrates, it’s been on the horizon for a while, laying down roots with spell check and predictive text. While I’m certain writing will go on without it, it’s not a development that I can simply ignore. This fast moving colonising force is front page news.
Writing is the way I make a living. It’s also a creative outlet. Reading someone else’s writing provides both knowledge and entertainment. Writing is a way of making sense of the world, its many problems, challenges and solutions. Surely stories are part of the fabric of civilisation.
Writer’s cramp n. muscular incapacity of the thumb and forefinger affecting those who constantly write.
These days I feel it more in my mind, that messy discontent when the words pile up. Nothing comes easily. The routine generation of copy for grinding deadlines.
For a few years our fledgling business shared a co-working space that did a strong line in tech start-ups. It was a cheap imitation of Silicon Valley, with dreams just as big, operating from a back street in a C-grade commercial district. All the furniture was second hand and the chairs felt too big for the desks. The meeting room had cushions in the shape of red and white toadstools. There was bright green astroturf instead of carpet.
While we tried to write, various aspiring entrepreneurs filmed their social videos, made calls and worked on perfecting their elevator spiel for venture capitalists. They’d invite us for coffee catch ups or to attend pitch nights. Often, they’d ask us to work for free writing their marketing materials, promising that they were destined for success. There was a lot of pivoting and defining. Very rarely they left for bigger things.
A business development coach used to rent a desk too. He’d spend his days preying on struggling businesses. There were endless meetings, and matchmaking opportunities, hooking people up who may have business synergy and could possibly be the solution to each other’s problems. After many coffees, his advice to us as a small writing business was simple, but impossible: what’s your value proposition? A question that seems even more pertinent, and just as unanswerable, today.
While AI has cast a shadow on my industry, every tech startup in the world is now banking on it.
Content n. 1. (usu. pl.) that which is contained: the contents of a cask, room, or book. 2. (usu. pl.) the chapters or chief topics of a book or document; a list of such chapters or topics. 3. Substance or purport, as of a document. 4. The sum of the attributes or notions composing a given conception; the substance or matter or cognition, etc.
We produce hundreds of articles a year for our content marketing clients who want to be thought leaders. We keep other freelance writers in work.
We’ve had articles go viral. We’ve successfully secured our clients new customers, media attention and speaking gigs. We’ve had an interviewee ‘come out’ to their family by sending them a profile we’d written about them. We’ve also had a single blog post directly lead to a multi-million dollar property sale.
There are clients who get it, and choose to flatter us. “You make me look so smart – I can’t even write a birthday card.”
There are clients who become codependent and call us when a national newspaper wants to know what they think about an issue in their own industry. “X doesn’t know what he thinks, can you write us something quickly that we can send to them?” their assistant asks. Sure we can. We now know more about what X thinks than X does.
Some clients acknowledge the codependency. “You sound more like me than I do!”.
Some clients just want articles written in their name but don’t want to know anything else about it. “Do I have to read it?” more than one paying client has asked.
Perhaps we’re doing our best work when the clients think they wrote it themselves. One time, we saw an article we devised and wrote for a client’s blog reproduced in an industry magazine. Congratulations, we say to them. “Oh thanks, I just threw it down on paper when the magazine asked me to write about it” they tell us, straightfaced, seemingly convinced that the article they’d paid us to write was their own blood, sweat and tears. Keeping this symbiotic relationship going means we don’t say a thing.
“People keep asking me to make my articles into a book,” boasts another client, whose research, ideas and words are all ours.
Another client, attempting to acknowledge the role we’d played in their eBook, kindly put my name as co author, without telling me. In reality, I never penned it – it was outsourced to a freelancer further down the food chain, who has the policy of never accepting a byline.
Creative adj. 1. having the quality or power of creating. 2. Resulting from originality of thought or expression. 3. Originative; productive (fol. by of). – creatively, adj. – creativeness, n.
I enjoy the freedom and satisfaction of being my own boss, and running my own company. I have autonomy and own my own time. No awkward yearly reviews, just my own KPIs of repeat customers and word of mouth referrals to hit or miss. After more than a decade, the reality is that I could never return to the constraints of a permanent office job. I’m now unemployable. I work hard, but I’m too used to the flexibility and luxury of choice, even if it flexes both ways.
I get to be creative, but much of my working life is not about writing at all. It’s about mining ideas, pitching, presenting and interviewing, briefing writers, editing, staying ahead of trends so I don’t become redundant, building ongoing relationships, agonising over setting prices, answering enquiries, providing customer service, documenting agreements, adding up invoices, and justifying the words we put on the page.
We’ve always had a make-hay-while-the-sun-shines mentality, because fashions change fast and it’s unlikely to last forever.
More often than not, it’s about using intuition, gut feel, and past experience to sift the genuine paying clients from the trouble makers who try to wriggle out of a contract or refuse to pay an invoice. It took many years to realise that most work isn’t simply transactional. It’s a game, and people like to win when they play.
Sometimes we play games to amuse ourselves. If there’s a client who has stretched the friendship, pushed the scope, or who’s late on payment, we adopt our roles: good cop and bad cop.
Eat one’s words, Colloq, to retract something said or written.
In early 2023, we realise we can’t beat AI, and it’s not going away, so we make a business decision to harness it.
Half-heartedly I experiment, writing with AI. It feels like betrayal. A lot like cheating. As if someone gave me all the answers for an exam I’m about to sit.
When I ask it for article ideas it spews out variations on a theme, scattered with some wild exaggerated suggestions. These caricatures turn out to be the ones the clients like best.
The small salve is that it involves a lot of intervention and many prompts to make it churn out quality writing. But it doesn’t for long.
While fully aware of the falsehoods of the ghostwriting I do, I cannot bring myself to use AI to do the writing – in my name or anyone else’s. The scratching, puzzling, labour of writing for me is what it’s all about.
Writing is a way of thinking. The process gives the result. If I skip this step, is it even writing at all?
In what feels like an ominous turn of events, that year I am engaged to ghostwrite profiles of a tech company’s staff, many of whom are responsible for training AI programs. Most of them are half my age, born well after my dictionary was published.
One of them leads a team of writers and other arts-inclined people who are busy teaching a Large Language Model to write creatively. This uber-style freelance global workforce spends their time encouraging AI to do its best work.
I’m out of a job, I laugh, during the interview. He simply smiles back at me, through Zoom, and shrugs. An old acoustic guitar hangs behind him on the wall. I look closely, but I can’t tell if it’s a real room or a background photo.
As 2023 draws rapidly to a close, it’s not hard to imagine it may be one of my last spent doing this.
Write out, 1. To put into writing. 2. To write in full form. 3. To exhaust the capacity or resources of by excessive writing: an author who has written himself out.
Plagiarism – of whole articles, ideas, styles and content formats – is rife in what we do. Sometimes a client asks us to pitch, then goes away and writes our ideas themselves. Often, entire articles we have written are reproduced, verbatim, on another businesses’ website. Many times they have the audacity to put their own name to it. We quietly report them to the legal departments of the companies we write for. It would be a full-time job to catch them all and, if we do approach them, they rarely know or care what copyright is. Accessibility has broken down all kinds of boundaries. Mostly we shrug our shoulders, take it as a compliment, and keep on writing.
Once, I too received an accusatory email from an editor about a story I had a rare byline on. He claimed I had copied an article on a niche news website. He was indignant but so was I. The article was originally mine, published years earlier, and plagiarised by his so-called writer.
These days AI is the king of piracy, blatantly ignoring the notion of copyright to build its capabilities on other writers’ work and encouraging others to do the same. Nothing is sacred, as it devours then spits out poetry, plays and novels. It turns the concept of authorship into something fluid, that spills and leaks away. Authorless.
As the new year ticks over into 2024, we spot an article on the website of a client’s competitor that is eerily familiar. The exact same topic. We recognise our own phrases, distinctively worded headlines, and particular conclusions that we drew for our client. But we can’t match it word-for-word. It’s like our work has been re-hashed and paraphrased, but a shadow of recognition still remains. After much puzzling, we realise they had likely asked ChatGPT to rewrite our article.
In the absence of a carbon copy, I feel like I’m an old fashioned murder mystery where the detective has located indented writing, sunk into the page underneath from the pressure of the writer’s pen. I need a certain angle of light, or the right shading with a lead pencil, to decipher the original, which has been removed.
As the year goes on, another client asked us to rewrite and edit a lengthy guide. The final page is a list of the many authors, institutions and contributors involved, plus a credit for the document’s designer. Even AI gets a mention: “Generative AI technology supported the development of this Guide… Specifically, ChatGPT-4 was used to brainstorm ideas and refine written content” they write. Is this acknowledgement a guilty admission, or pride? It’s hard to tell.
When we finish the job, we duly add our own company details to this page, as editors. When we see the final document published online, our acknowledgement has been erased, but the credit to AI remains.
The last word, 1. The closing remark, as of an argument. 2. The very latest, most modern, or most fashionable; the best, or most sophisticated: this machine is the last word in automation.
The dictionary’s chosen example seems prescient. Can or should you automate writing? A futile question, asked too late, when the technology is already being used. While it matters to me, personally, it won’t matter to many. In 2025 AI writing tools are built into every computer app or program. AI makes what I do cheaper, faster, easier, more accessible. I’m no longer efficient.
While enjoyment is reason enough to continue writing for creative or artistic pleasure, it won’t stack up in a cost-benefit analysis. The harsh reality is that in just two years everything has changed.
I find myself googling “data scientist”: a new career, integral to AI, that’s not in the dictionary. A savvy freelance writer left us to pursue it a few years ago – well before I’d ever heard the term, or imagined it might help AI take over my job. How did she know?
Trending in my social feed are stories about writers being laid off, after their employer encouraged them to make any and every use of AI writing platforms. The comments range from outraged to sad. Others, wanting to teach the ‘creatives’ a business lesson, say it’s just another example of companies prioritising efficiency and tech assisting profits. While they are right, to me this represents more. This fundamental human skill, that has helped define us and articulate knowledge for thousands of years, is being quickly erased. I actually feel a bit queasy when I think about it.
Also in my feed are post after post from indignant authors who are preparing to take on the tech giants who unlawfully used their novels and books to train AI. Meanwhile, Bill Gates is predicting accountants and lawyers will be out of work in 10 years. I fear it may be sooner.
I try to avoid self-pity. But some days I feel like a man with a shovel, done out of a job by the entrance of a digging machine. Or the ladies of the typing pool, made redundant by the word processor. I’m on borrowed time, and it’s my turn to pivot. The technological revolution is in full swing. All jobs are in its firing line.
I take on a side hustle at the university, tutoring in communications, and wonder if we’re not selling these eager students a false dream. They repay me with essays that are blandly undecipherable, thanks to AI.
Writing has become my saleable skill, so perhaps there’s also a degree of mourning. The reduction of the knowledge and work I’ve honed over a career; one I perhaps took for granted.
In content marketing we like to pitch “evergreen” articles to clients: those which don’t date. Ones that give the most bang for buck. In real life, the pace of change is coming so fast that even as I write this essay, it’s surprising how many parts of it become obsolete. Deleted. There’s nothing evergreen about these times at all.
At almost 30 years old, the outside edges of the thin paper pages in my dictionary have started to yellow. Rather than returning it to the bookshelf, I’ve left the dictionary on my desk. Its green spine is so fat it stands upright, on its own, next to my laptop and double screens. Its hefty finite order feels like a counterbalance against these changing grounds.
AI will free me up, save time, the rhetoric says. But if I’m a writer, what exactly will it free me up to do?
What happens if we’re no longer writing our stories – if we don’t control the narrative? What happens when the real ghosts step in?
I wish I could answer these questions, but they loom so large in my path that I can only describe them. Instead, I try to imagine the story I will become and how I might write it.
Emma Sorensen is an Australian writer, based in Sydney. After beginning her career in book publishing she worked as a journalist and editor. She currently tutors writing and communications subjects at university. Given ghost writing is her specialty, you won’t see her name attached to most of her work, but she has also had non-fiction published in her own name in literary journals including Antipodes, Island and Meanjin.