Things I’d never outsource to a robot: sex and the joy of writing |
Things I’d never outsource to a robot: sex and the joy of writing
June 6, 2026 — 9:30am
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In several previous lives, I was other people: soldiers, footballers and a football coach, an accused murderer, a racehorse trainer, a crusading mother and father, and a few cricketers.
As a ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs, at one level your job is functional. You sit down with the subject. They talk, you record. You type what they’ve said and turn it into a book – their book.
At another level, your job can be quite creative. You don’t just listen to them; you inhabit and re-imagine them. A story is more than just a sackful of words. It can be uncanny to live inside someone else’s head, and for them to collaborate in their own impersonation. The more effort you put into getting their voice right, the better your chances of building a close relationship and a memorable experience.
It’s inefficient to type out dozens of hours of recordings. I could have outsourced that to transcription services or, later, artificial intelligence. But for all the inefficiency, I felt that by listening to them over and over, by some magic of osmosis I could truly be their “ghost”.
So when I see writers using AI to increase their efficiency, as if writing were an assembly line of mechanical functions, I feel sorry for them.
‘Odd choices of words’: How an academic’s AI use was exposed by her peers
This week, it emerged that the Western Sydney University pro vice-chancellor Cath Ellis used AI in writing an opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald, which also appeared on The Age’s website, on the subject of AI (what else?). Unapologetic, Ellis responded that her article was not written “by” but “with” AI, “and there’s a really big difference there”.
What exactly is that difference?
Ellis “uploaded........