AI Can Write the Sentences. It Can’t Get the Story.

A response to Jasmine Sun on the independent writer’s advantage — and why ghostwriting is more human work than ever.

By Deborah Holmen, M.Ed., NBCT

AI Can Write the Sentences. It Can’t Get the Story.

A response to Jasmine Sun on the independent writer’s advantage — and why ghostwriting is more human work than ever.

Jasmine Sun published a piece this month called “The Independent Writer’s Advantage in the Age of AI.” It ran on Substack, adapted from a talk she gave at the Once and Future Media Forum. I read it twice. The argument, distilled: the parts of writing that AI made cheap were never the point. The parts it can’t touch — secrets, live presence, a real voice, a real person standing behind the work — are about to be worth more, not less.

I think she’s right. I also write under other people’s names for a living, which makes me a strange person to be nodding along to an essay about the value of a personal voice. So let me make the case anyway, because ghostwriting might be the clearest example she could have picked.

The product was never the prose

A ghostwriter’s deliverable looks like a manuscript. It isn’t. The manuscript is the receipt. The actual work happens before a single usable word gets typed — the hours across a table from someone, the question they didn’t see coming, the offhand aside they almost skipped that turns out to be the whole book.

Jasmine puts it this way: reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public. Ghostwriting is that same act, aimed at one person’s life or one person’s expertise instead of a beat. The thing in the whisper network, the thing they’ve never said out loud, the thing they don’t even know is interesting because they’ve lived inside it for thirty years — my job is to pluck it out and put it on the page.

Take a clinician. I write a lot of books for doctors in functional medicine and related fields. Everything that makes one of them worth reading is the stuff that isn’t in any database: the patient who didn’t fit the protocol, the hunch that paid off, the failure that changed how they practice. AI has read every paper that doctor has ever cited. It has never sat in her exam room. I have to get that out of her, one conversation at a time, and that extraction is the work. There’s no training data for a life.

AI can copy a style. It can’t protect a voice.

This is where Jasmine and I shake hands hardest. She says the value of polish is going down and the value of voice, charisma, and plain weirdness is going up.

Most people assume ghostwriting means sanding a person down into a generic “professional author.” That’s what bad ghostwriting does. Good ghostwriting does the opposite. The job is to keep the tics. Keep the way the person actually talks. Keep the strange, specific metaphor that only they would ever reach for, because that metaphor is the fingerprint.

Take Bradley. Bradley is not a talker. Early on, his answers ran three sentences, while most people gave me thirty, and I worried we wouldn’t have enough to build on. I was wrong. What he gave me was short, but it was dry and exact and unmistakably his — the kind of voice you can’t manufacture. His transcripts read like someone had carved each line. The problem was never the quality. It was that Bradley had no idea which of his own moments mattered, because he’d lived inside all of them.

So I stopped asking him to say more and started asking in a different way. Not “what happened next” but “what did the room smell like,” “who was standing where,” “what did you not say out loud.” One four-word answer about [the thing he mentioned in passing] cracked open an entire chapter. He’d carried it for [years] and never thought to bring it up, because to him it was just an ordinary day. That’s the part no machine does. A model can expand his three sentences into thirty. It can’t know that the three sentences were already perfect — and that the real story was the one he wasn’t telling yet.

AI’s failure mode is the average. Feed it a voice, and it quietly regresses everything toward competent, frictionless mush — the prose equivalent of a clinic's waiting room. My job is to fight the average on the client’s behalf. The weird, specific, slightly too honest thing is not a flaw to clean up. It’s the asset. It’s the reason the book sounds like a human wrote it, because one did, and another human protected it.

The work is live, and the client feels it

Jasmine makes a third point: static content is losing value, live interaction is gaining it, because people want proof that there’s a person behind the words.

Ghostwriting is months of live interaction. It is not a transaction; it’s a relationship with a deadline. The client isn’t buying pages. They’re buying the experience of being heard all the way through, and — just as important — being held to finishing the thing they’ve started five times and abandoned five times. AI will generate a chapter at 2 a.m. and never once ask why you keep avoiding the hard one. A person notices. A person says, we’re not skipping that part.

What clients tell me, more than anything else, is that it was the first time someone sat with the whole story and didn’t flinch. That is not a feature any model ships. It’s the entire job.

Trust is the person, not the sentence

Here’s Jasmine’s sharpest line, and the one I’d frame on the wall: trust isn’t about the quality of the information. It’s about the messenger.

A reader trusts a clinician’s book because they trust the clinician — the track record, the name on the spine, the years. My whole task is to make sure the finished book sounds enough like that person that the trust survives contact with the page. Get the voice wrong, and the trust leaks out, no matter how clean the writing is.

And it runs the other direction too. The client trusts me with material they’ve handed to no one — the worst year, the thing they’re still ashamed of, the diagnosis they buried. You don’t give that to a machine. You give it to a human who will carry it carefully and set it down gently.

Where the machines actually help

I’m not anti-AI, and neither is Jasmine. She’s open about using it for the stuff she doesn’t want to do — checking citations, reading a contract before she signs, even negotiating fees. Same here. I let it pressure-test structure, surface holes in an argument, and handle the parts of the work that were always a slog. That’s not a threat to the craft. It’s a gift, because it gives me back the hours to spend on the only thing that ever mattered: sitting with the person and getting the real story.

That’s the version of this future I’m betting on. Use the tools for the typing. Spend the time you save being more human, not less.

So here’s the part where I tell you what I do

Jasmine would tell me to, so I will.

I ghostwrite books for people who have a story or a body of knowledge that’s been sitting in them for years — memoirs, and author books for clinicians and experts in functional medicine and the fields around it. The work is part interview, part archaeology, part voice-matching, and all human.

If you’ve been carrying a book and can’t get it out of your own head, here’s the good news and the bad news in one sentence: the bottleneck was never the typing. AI made the typing nearly free. The story still needs a person to go in and get it — and then a person who knows how to keep it sounding like you.

That part isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it just got more valuable.

Jasmine Sun’s original piece, “The Independent Writer’s Advantage in the Age of AI,” was published June 2, 2026, on Substack and adapted from her talk at the Once and Future Media Forum. Read it here: https://on.substack.com/p/the-independent-writers-advantage. Jasmine publishes her own work at jasmi.news. It’s worth your time.