← The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
8 Reasons Why AI Won't Ruin The Ghostwriting Industry
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My name is Nicholas Cole. I'm one of the highest paid ghostwriters in the world. And one of the questions I get asked the most is why should I start ghostwriting? Or why should I build the skill of becoming a ghostwriter if AI is just going to take all the jobs? And the answer is, because AI is not going to take all the jobs. All right? Whenever I hear someone say this, it's just a signal to me that they're really uneducated about both AI and ghostwriting. Okay? Because if you understood these things, and I'm going to walk you through eight reasons why AI is not going to ruin the ghostwriting industry. If you understood these things, you would realize that AI is going to unlock 100 times more opportunity. It's not going to replace ghostwriters. It's going to make ghostwriters more efficient. Okay, so let me walk you through why AI is not going to ruin the ghostwriting industry. The first is you need to know how to use AI in order for it to replace a job in a business. So when people see this technology, they jump to the conclusion, oh, well, this is just going to take all the jobs. AI is just going to do everything. Well, that glosses over the fact that the business owner or someone on the team needs to know how to use AI in order to replace a job. And the, the metaphor I like using is that 99% of the population doesn't even know how to create a basic filter in Gmail. So if they don't know how to create a simple filter in the same email system that we've been using for 20 years, what makes you think that just magically overnight they're going to understand how to use ChatGPT and Claude and how to connect it to Zapier and how to create automations and how to. Like, they're not. They don't know how to do that. Okay? So your job as a ghostwriter is not just to write. Your job is to use this technology to make yourself more efficient and to help these business owners accomplish things in their business. And it's a tremendous misunderstanding of your value. If you just think, oh, the business owner is just going to use it themselves. They're not. It takes time to learn how to use these tools. It takes time to use the tools and then clarify the output, get better and better output. Right. It's not enough to just go to Claude and say, write me a LinkedIn post. That's not enough. You have to ask Claude something else. How do you know what to ask it for? Do you have the time to sit there and play with it and go, actually, what you gave me isn't quite right. Could you add a stat? Actually, that stat isn't what I want to use. Can you source it from somewhere different? All of these things take time and they require skills. So it's a severe misunderstanding to think that people are just going to open Claude or open ChatGPT for the first time and then magically you don't have a job anymore. Okay? There's 34 million small businesses in the United States. Again, the vast majority don't even know how to create a filter in Gmail. They don't even know how to do a simple automation where you take information from an email and upload it to an Excel document. Right? So what makes you think that they're just magically going to understand how to create an entire content strategy or how to automate their, their email flows or how to connect different email systems to like, they don't know how to do any of that. Okay, Reason number two, uneducated inputs lead to low quality outputs. So everyone thinks that just because AI writes it in front of you, that that's the output. And that's not true. If you give ChatGPT or if you give Claude or you give any of these AI platforms a weak input, it's going to give you a weak output. Okay? And considering that most people, they don't know what makes good content on X, they don't know how to write well on LinkedIn, they don't know how to write articles versus tweets versus threads versus carousels, right? They don't know what makes a great weekly newsletter, they don't know the different sequences that you should have in a newsletter. They don't know the different automations, they don't know how to send different things to different, different segments. Right? And the, the misunderstanding with AI is that you can just go to ChatGPT and go, not only do I want you to create it, but I want you to create the whole strategy and I want you to talk to all the different platforms and I want you to create the cadence and I want you to fill in the blank. And it doesn't work that way, Right? So yes, AI can help you streamline some of these things, it can unlock some efficiency, but we are a far, far, far ways away from being able to just tell Claude, I want you to create an entire content strategy for me and I want you to talk to all the platforms and I want you to do it all for Me, without me lifting a finger. That's not how it works. And if you think that's how AI works, then you haven't played with it enough. Right? Reason number three, people don't want to write, or people don't write on the Internet because they're scared, not because they don't know how. This is a really important one. I have ghostwritten for a tremendous amount of people at this point, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of CEOs and Silicon Valley founders and bitcoin billionaires like everyone across the board. And over and over and over again, one of the biggest issues that I ran into and why they saw value in working with me, wasn't that they didn't know things. It wasn't that they didn't have value. Of course they had value. Of course they had valuable things to share. They had insights, they had frameworks. They had worked in this career for 10, 20, 30 years. They had all this knowledge accumulated. One of their biggest problems as a client was that they were afraid to put themselves out there. They didn't have confidence in their ideas or in their frameworks, or they knew something really valuable, but they didn't want to put it out into the world because they were afraid of criticism, Right? They were afraid of judgment. In some cases, they were afraid of being canceled. They had a strong opinion on something. They were afraid of receiving negative feedback. And a lot of the role that I played as a ghostwriter was giving people that confidence. And how I gave them that confidence was through our conversations. So my process was we would get on the phone and we would talk with them, and we would ask them questions, and we would record the conversations. And it was through those conversations that I helped them clarify their ideas. And when they would say something, I would go. That is actually a really valuable insight. I think readers would find a lot of value in that. And I can't tell you how many times the client would say to me, really, I never would have thought that that was valuable. And so by me mirroring that to them, that gave them the confidence that helped them clarify their ideas, that made them want to share what they knew in public. The fact that you can use technology to help streamline or accelerate the writing only solves one of the problems. It only. It's a small part of the equation. The much bigger problem is that the person sitting behind the computer isn't confident in their ideas. They haven't thought through them. They haven't clarified them. They need someone else to go, that is a great idea. Or they need Someone else to go. Don't worry. I've been doing this for a long time. You saying that not a big deal. Like, it's not. You're not going to get canceled, right? You would. You would be shocked at how many smart people I've worked with that had every faulty belief you could possibly think of. I can't tell you how many times a client said to me, I don't want to share my insights in public because I don't want to become famous like Kim Kardashian. Okay, another faulty belief. You really think if you just write two things on the Internet, you're just magically going to be one of the most followed people on the entire planet? Of course not. Right. So your role as a ghostwriter goes way beyond just the writing. It has a lot to do with the relationship with the client and helping them overcome all of those faulty beliefs. It's not going anywhere. People have been people for as long as people have been on Earth, right? And we always have the same problems. We always get in our own way. We always adopt these faulty beliefs. We always find excuses not to take action. And I promise you, the smartest, most accomplished people in the world, they all struggle with it, too. That's why they hired me. Because they needed someone to help clarify their ideas and in many ways mirror back to them that what they wanted to and what they could share out in the world was valuable. Reason number four, writing is only 50% of the value. More and more, I'm of the belief that it's actually less than 50%. Your role as a ghostwriter is not just to write. It's to do all the other things that surround and wrap the writing. Right? It's to audit and optimize the client's profiles. What is their bio like? Do they have a pinned asset? You know, like, are they naming their target audience? What tech stack are they using? Do they have automations? You know, like, how is the algorithm changing? Maybe there's a new format that's going viral more often. Maybe you should use that. You should change the strategy. Are they responding to comments? Are they engaging with followers? Are they doing cold outreach? Like, there are so many other things that wrap around the writing that it really devalues the role to think that your job as a writer or as a ghostwriter is to just write. And a great example of this is all of the people who think that's the role. They're on upwork, they're on fiverr, and what they're doing is they're Raising their hand and they're saying, I'm available for hire. I charge $15 an hour, $20 per hour. You tell me what you need and I'll write it. And the reason why all of those writers struggle to make good money is because they think that their entire job is I just write. And they don't realize that the reason why everyone else makes so much money, like why I was able to charge 3,000, 4,000, $5,000 for a single 800 word article, but people are charging $20 for an 800 word article on Upwork. Right? Why? Why that difference was because I built all of the other skills. I built the skill of going out and finding clients on my own. I built the skill of interviewing and being able to extract content. I built the skill of, wait, your profile is not optimized, we should optimize that. I built the skill of free consulting. Let me tell you all the other things that we could do together. Let me tell you all the other problems that you could solve. Right? So it's not actually just the writing. And anyone who thinks the way I make more money is by just becoming a better writer. You have a really flawed understanding of how the game works. Okay? If you want to get better at the craft of writing, you get better at the craft of writing. If you want to get better at making money as a writer, then you have to build all the other skills that surround the writing. Okay? And so because of this, you can look at platforms like ChatGPT or Claude and Go, all right, well, that's, you know, that's going to make the writing 10 times easier. It probably will. I love using ChatGPT and Claude, but I'm not worried about it replacing any of the work that I do, because so much of the value that I provide or that you would provide as a ghostwriter isn't the writing. It's all the things that surround the writing. And that's the part that AI is not AI can't take that away from you, at least for the time being. I think we still got a good decade before the robots take over. Reason number five, most people don't know what they know and they need someone to help them realize it. So I'll give you a quick story on this. So when I first moved to Los Angeles in 2017, I was like 27 years old. I had just. I had been ghostwriting for maybe a year, and I moved to LA and I went to this event. Long story short, I met this really successful tech entrepreneur and angel investor. He had One of the most successful tech exits of all time. 100 million plus, whole story. And we connected at this event. And at the time, I, you know, was writing for Inc Magazine. And so what I would do is I would use my column at Inc Magazine to, like, build relationships with these types of people because I wanted to learn from them. And I would say, you know, hey, I'll write an article about your insights about you inside Inc Magazine on their digital publication. And I really did that just so that I could sit in the same room as really cool entrepreneurs or with really cool entrepreneurs and ask them questions. And he loved that idea. And he was like, cool, come by my house one day and we can talk. And, you know, who doesn't want to be quoted or talked about in a publication matters less and less each day. But, you know, five, seven years ago, it was cool. And so I go to his house. He had this epic, you know, Iron man style house up in Hollywood Hills. And I went over to his house one afternoon and I walk in. He introduced me to class. Azul Tequila, which is now my favorite Tequila Tequila. He pours me a glass. We both have one. We bring it out to his deck overlooking the entire city. It was super cool. And we're sitting there and we just talk for like three hours. And I basically got to ask him every question that I could possibly think of, all in the spirit of, hey, I could write this article, but really, I just was like, I want to learn. And he was explaining all sorts of stuff to me, like how he thought about building startups and how he thought about raising money and frameworks for hiring and frameworks for creating viral loops inside software, like, all sorts of stuff. And I remember at some point in the conversation, I turned to him and I was like, why haven't you written about any of these things online? Like, this is. This was also in the back of my mind, I was like, this is how I sparked the conversation of him becoming a client at my ghostwriting agency. Like, why haven't you been writing any of these things? You know, I could help you with that. And he just looks at me with the. With the most serious look on his face and he goes, well, why should I? Do you think people would find this valuable? And it was almost so jarring that I thought he was kidding. And I looked at him and I was like, yeah, what do you mean would people find this valuable? You had one of the biggest tech exits of all time, and you're blowing my mind right now. Like, every entrepreneur would love to learn from you. And it was one of those moments where he just. And he admitted it to me. He was like, oh, I just, you know, I guess I take my knowledge for granted. Like, I don't think this is valuable to someone else because it's so second nature to me. Like, this is just what I think about what I do every single day. And that was such a huge learning moment for me where it made me realize, you know, even the smartest, most successful people in the world take their knowledge for granted. And then fast forward and, you know, after building my ghostwriting agency, and then after building ship 30 for 30, which was our beginner writing program, and then building our premium ghostwriting academy, which helps people become ghostwriters just like I did, I've really learned that this problem exists on every level. It exists for beginners, and it exists for billionaires. You know, and the problem is that we. We know the things we know, and we never step out of ourselves and realize that what we know, we take for granted. But to anyone else, they would really appreciate that knowledge and that information. And so, again, your value as a ghostwriter goes way beyond, just tell me what to write, or I will write for you. It's a misunderstanding of the role. A lot of your value is in listening. I spent three hours with that entrepreneur. I sat on his deck. We sipped tequila. He talked. And as he talked, I was parsing in my brain, going, oh, I've heard that before. Not new, not super valuable. I haven't heard that before. That would make for an amazing piece. And that was a lot of my value. And even in our conversation, I would point those things out to him, and he was like, oh, cool. I never thought about it that way. Just to show you how this works, by the way, he was so interested in our conversation and the things that I was pointing out to him that I said, why don't I do some free work for you? ROI of free work. Did he have the money? Absolutely. Did I need the money? Not really. At the time, like, my ghostwriting agency was growing. I didn't need it. I was like, why don't I do some free work and we'll see where it goes. I wrote two pieces for him for free. He was so impressed with them that not only did he become a client, he also became one of our investors. And so then he invested in our company, helped us grow a ton. And, like, that's just such a great example of so many different things, like, why free work is so valuable. Paid dividends introduced me to so many Other cool entrepreneurs was a massive learning moment for me. Built a really great relationship with a really successful entrepreneur that taught me a ton of things about entrepreneurship, helped me clarify a lot of my own frameworks just in doing that. Right. But it's a great example too of why your job as a ghostwriter is to mirror back what that value is. And that's not something like, think about how much time that person would have to spend talking to ChatGPT or talking to Claude and be able to have the awareness to know that that's the goal and that's what they need. Like, how do I prompt AI to help me come to those conclusions? So again, your value as a ghostwriter goes way beyond just tell me what to write or I'm going to write for you. It's actually helping them parse through what are the things that have already been said before or like, isn't really new and interesting content versus what do you hear them say where you go, wow, I've never heard someone explain it that way before. That would make for a great piece. Right? It's that mirroring that's a ton of your value. Reason number six, AI doesn't have training data on your life experiences. This is a really interesting one. A lot of the highest performing content, and I've done this with clients for years, a lot of the highest performing content comes through personal narrative. So it's this combination of usually some sort of how to or futurism, here's where I think the industry's going, or here's you know, how to do this certain thing, or here's, you know, hiring tips or a framework to build software. Like, whatever it is, but what makes it great content is when you marry it with some sort of personal story. So I'll give you a really easy example. Imagine you open a piece and it's like, here are my five fire or here are my five hiring tips for a small business doing less than a million dollars a year. Right? You're like, that might be helpful. It grabs you in a completely different way if the piece opens with, I started my first company when I was 24 years old and by the time I was 27, we were doing X amount 1 million, 2 million, 5 million, insert whatever number you want. We were doing 10 million in revenue and I've hired over 100 people in my decade, over the past decade. Here are five hiring tips that have really helped me go through all of these different growth phases. Right? It's the personal story aspect that brings you in. It acts as A little bit of credibility, but it also brings you into that person's world. You can amp it up when the personal experiences get more dramatic, right? Like one of my favorite examples, I will never forget, it was like the first two sentences of a Quora answer that I read back in 2015. And the Quora answer was something like, what's it like to be entrepreneurship? Or what's the definition of entrepreneurship? And instead of someone answering, the top answer, instead of someone answering, just here's the traditional definition of entrepreneurship. The first two sentences were something like, I started my first company when I was 19 and I became a millionaire a year later. And then 18 months after that I was broke and back on my parents couch. And it was such a great example of it was the personal story hook that before I could even decide whether or not I wanted to read that answer, I was already reading it. And you see this everywhere. You see it on every social platform. And it's one of those things that it never stops working, right? We always want the personal story aspect. And so the thing that AI can't really automate unless you take the time to give it a tremendous amount of training data, is it can't really automate being able to write things that pull from personal experiences when it doesn't know what your personal experiences are. And so again, how do you make that more efficient? Well, there's a lot of efficiency that can be built when you're working with a ghostwriter. So from the perspective of a client, there's a lot of efficiency that can be built when you're having this conversation with the ghostwriter and the ghostwriter is asking you questions and you record the calls and they share all these random little tidbits and stories. And over time, you know, I've been doing this manually. You can see how with AI you can streamline this and make this more efficient for yourself as a ghostwriter. But what I would do manually is every time the client would share some sort of personal story or detail with me, I would add it to a repository and I'd be like, here are all these random things that I know about this client. I can now use those in any future piece, right? And so now AI just helps you build that repository faster, right? And then over time, you take all those recorded calls, you build the knowledge base of Claude or whatever platform you're using, and you start to know more and more about the client. But you have to keep in mind that that takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. And the client isn't going to sit there by themselves in a padded room and do all of that alone, right? A lot of that comes through conversation. Again, going back to the previous point, people take their knowledge for granted. People take their personal experiences for granted. It's not until you're on a call with a ghostwriter and the ghostwriter asks you a question and you're like, oh, I never thought about it that way. Let me tell you this random story that comes to mind, right? So so much about the value here is in the partnership. It's. The client isn't just going to. Just because AI and Claude and ChatGPT and all these platforms exist, they're not going to sit by themselves for four hours a day and like, brain dump all of this into the technology. In many ways, they need someone to prompt them. Prompt is the key word, right? You're prompting through conversation, and then you can take all those conversations and create your own prompts from it. Okay? Reason number seven, the highest form of writing is saying what hasn't been said yet. And this goes back to this idea where a lot of your value as a writer comes down to being able to parse through what has been said and what hasn't, or what has been said in a specific way versus how do you say the same thing in a new and different way? How do you wrap it differently? And what AI is not very good at, and this is the whole skill of writing, and this is. This is where your value starts to compound as a ghostwriter is AI is not very good at coming up with new things to say because its entire job is to study all the things that have been said, right? And then spit it back to you. It's sort of like asking a dictionary for the answer, right? It's not going to pull a new word, it's going to source from its knowledge base and go, well, here's the best answer that I can give you, right? So it's not great at innovating, it's good at crawling, but it's not good at innovating. And it's also not good at finding new ways to say old things, right? It's not great at languaging, it's not great at naming and claiming. And the only time that it can start doing that is if you prompt it on how to do that, which requires a new set of training data, right? So it, it is a. There's a big misunderstanding in thinking like AI is just going to steal everything. AI is going to ruin all the jobs. No. If you Say that then you don't understand the value of the writing in the first place. And what AI will do really, really well is AI will give you the first 40%, 50%, right? It'll give you the baseline ideas. It can maybe take you to 80% if you prompt it really well. And if you give it a really specific knowledge base and it will improve over time, it's going to be a while before it is able to do that last 20%, which is where so much of your value as a ghostwriter or as a writer exists is. It's not just about I'm going to write the piece, it's thinking through, well, what is the compelling idea to begin with, right? What are the things that haven't been said? How do you name and claim this thing in a new way so that it stands out? How do you name and claim it in a way that is sticky? AI doesn't do these things intuitively. In order for AI to do that, you have to prompt it. And in order to prompt it, you have to have the knowledge yourself and the client or like more specifically the average business owner. Remember, the average person doesn't know how to create a basic filter in Gmail, so what makes you think they're going to know how to prompt AI to do all of those things? They're not. What's going to happen is they're going to do the same thing everyone else does, which is they open cloud or they open ChatGPT and they're going to go write me a viral LinkedIn post. And because the prompt is so is so unspecific, AI is going to spit out a really low quality output and then they're going to do two things. They're either going to not know that it's low quality, look at it and go, what do I need a ghostwriter for? I can just use this. And then they post it on LinkedIn or post it on X and it's going to get no engagement or whatever. And then they're not going to know. And then they're going to chalk the whole thing up and be like, social platforms don't work and AI is broken and whatever. Or they're going to look at it and go, that sucks. I guess AI isn't there yet. I shouldn't use this tool. And both conclusions are wrong. Both just jump to, I guess it doesn't work, or I guess it doesn't work for me and fail to ask the question, maybe I have no idea what I'm doing. And so when I go through all of these things. I just there, to me, there is no reason why AI is going to replace ghostwriting anytime soon. And the parts that it's going to replace are all the parts that have already been replaced. You just see it happening in a different marketplace. It's called upwork. It's called fiverr. Why do you think those writers can only charge 5 bucks an hour? 10 bucks an hour, 20 bucks an hour? Right. Why are they all competing over bottom of the barrel jobs? The reason they're all competing over bottom of the barrel jobs is because they're only executing the lowest quality form of the role. Right. And what makes what. What allows you to charge more and more money as a ghostwriter isn't just the writing. It's all the skills that get wrapped around the writing. And it's going to be a really, really, really long time before we can just open up a laptop and go, hey, AI agent, can you just do everything from the outreach to the sales process to I want you to get on the phone and talk to the client for me? What? AI is not going to do that. So this is one of those topics that gets me really fired up. And I hope this helps you understand that whenever you hear someone say, oh, AI is just going to ruin that job, you know, it often is overblown, and it often comes with a severe misunderstanding of what makes that job in the first place. Now, will AI remove jobs? Absolutely. My personal opinion is that ghostwriting is not one of them. And I think what's going to happen instead is you're going to see 100 times more ghostwriters. And the reason you're going to see so many more ghostwriters is because everybody is going to realize that they need to play the Internet game. Every single business owner needs to create content online. Every single business owner needs to scale themselves across multiple platforms. Every single business owner needs to figure out how to say the same thing a hundred times. And they don't have the time and they don't have the skill to do all of that on their own. So who do they hire? They hire a ghostwriter.