Scroll through LinkedIn for about five minutes and you’ll see someone condemning an AI-written post.
It’s like they’ve uncovered a scandal or caught someone in a lie.
They proudly point their finger and say, “This person didn’t write this. It’s AI. Got you.”
And, I find this confusing.
Because people have been passing off content they didn’t write as their own for centuries.
Politicians have used speechwriters, CEOs have had communications teams, and authors have worked with collaborators who helped turn a rough concept into a polished manuscript.
It’s called ghostwriting.
It’s widely understood and accepted. You can hire someone to help you put your ideas into words.
So, why does it matter now that a tool is doing the work instead of a ghostwriter?
I keep coming back to this question, because I think the answer exposes something people don’t understand about AI.
The backlash against AI content isn’t really about using AI to write.
The backlash is about using AI to think.
With ghostwriting, we understand that a human thinks deeply about their ideas and then shares those thoughts with another human. The “author” provides the voice, experience, and perspective. The ghostwriter provides the copy to tell the story.
The result is content that has real thinking, real expertise, and real point of view.
And, this is the same result you get when AI is used properly.
You can think deeply about your ideas, share context and perspective, and use AI to help you shape those ideas into copy. The output still reflects you. The ideas and thinking are still yours.
That’s the part that gets lost in the call-out culture around AI-generated content.
People assume using AI means skipping the thinking.
They think everyone using AI is typing, “Write me a LinkedIn post about marketing,” and hitting publish. Sure, that happens (and maybe those posts do deserve to be called out).
But when someone uses AI to write a post like they would use a ghostwriter, that’s an entirely different circumstance.
When someone sits down with a ghostwriter:
- They don’t show up empty-handed. They bring their stories, opinions, and hard-won lessons.
- They brief the writer, review the draft, and push back when something doesn’t sound like them.
- The quality of the collaboration depends entirely on the quality of the input.
AI works the same way.
If you bring nothing to it, you get nothing meaningful back.
But if you bring your real ideas, your actual experiences, and your specific take on a topic, and then use AI to help you find the words, the result is genuinely yours.
The tool changed. The process didn’t.
We need to stop condemning all AI content as bad or lazy or evil.
There’s a very real difference between someone using AI as a content collaborator versus someone using it to mass-produce text with zero thought behind it.
We don’t question whether a business owner wrote their own website copy, used a copywriting formula, or hired someone. We don’t ask if a founder wrote their own investor pitch or had a coach help them sharpen it. We’ve always accepted that getting help with how you say something doesn’t diminish what you’re saying. AI is just the next version of that help.
We shouldn’t be asking, “Did AI write this?”
We should be asking, “Did this actually say something worth reading?”
Because if the ideas are real, the perspective is genuine, and the content is useful, does the tool used to write it really change any of that?
I don’t think so.
What it does is make the craft of communication more accessible. More people and small business owners can show up consistently, share what they know, and connect with the people they’re trying to reach.
That seems like a good thing to me.
If you are struggling with using AI for turning your thoughts into quality content, let’s talk. I can help you set up your AI tools to sound less like a robot and more like you.
(It’s worth noting that there are many other reasons people simply don’t like AI. I wrote about that here.)
