If using ChatGPT is deemed cheating, what about having someone ghostwrite for you? An age-old issue lurks beneath this new controversy.

In February 2023, when ChatGPT had been launched for just over a year, a heinous on-campus shooting incident took place at Michigan State University. After the incident, Vanderbilt University sent a consolation email to all students across the campus.

The email read: "This tragedy in Michigan reminds us how important it is to stay with and look after one another." However, most people did not notice a line of extremely small text at the very bottom of the email: This article was rewritten with the assistance of ChatGPT developed by OpenAI.

The students immediately erupted in anger after seeing this.

A senior student complained: "This is so ironic and ridiculous! For an article that advocates unity, empathy, warmth and mutual help, the school didn't even bother to calm down and write it with sincere thinking, but directly asked the machine to write it for them?"

The school apologized after the incident and specially launched a professional ethics investigation. An associate dean came forward to explain that this was just an unavoidable mistake in the process of the school adapting to new technologies.

It is no exaggeration to say that the current popularization of AI has left teachers, students and creators all in a dilemma: does using AI to help write things count as a violation of regulations, or as unethical behavior?

Image source: Generated by Doubao AI

In fact, similar controversies are by no means new events.

The debate over "asking others to write on one's behalf" has lasted for more than a hundred years: if an article is signed by a person but not actually written by him, is this work authentic at all?

Hiring ghostwriters: The century-old "content outsourcing"

The so-called ghostwriting refers to paying others to write things for you and putting your own name on the final work, a model that has existed for hundreds of years.

In modern times, ghostwriting is mostly a cooperation between professional writers, celebrities and industry leaders. These people have fame, resources and status, but they do not have the time, writing skills or energy to write books in person, so they turn to professional writers for help to complete the works.

After the book is published, the ghostwriter generally does not remain completely anonymous. Most of the time, they will be mentioned in the acknowledgments, marked as "friend" or "consultant". In a few cases, the ghostwriter's name will be printed on the cover together with the signed author. But no matter which way it is, all the right to speak and ownership of the book ultimately belong to the paying client.

Interestingly, if you search on Google for "others write articles for you with your own name signed", there is no result mentioning the word "ghostwriting" at all.

The top results are "pen name", "alias", followed by negative terms such as "plagiarism" and "defamation".

An article published in *The American Scholar* in 1953 also mentioned that in the 1950s, the academic circle often confused "forged works" with "ghostwriting", and forgery itself is an act of fraud with the purpose of deception.

To put it bluntly, even formal ghostwriting with mutual consent and clear pricing has long been highly controversial at the moral level. No wonder many celebrities and industry leaders will deliberately hide the fact that they have hired ghostwriters, and the public will always feel awkward and uncomfortable when seeing ghostwritten works.

This sense of discomfort is mutual.

Whether it is criticism from outsiders or the self-consumption of the parties involved, the essence is one thing: even if you pay for the content and the content itself is authentic, treating the words written by others as your own achievements entirely ultimately carries a hint of deception.

Major ghostwriting agencies have been working hard to whitewash this negative impression, repeatedly telling their clients that ghostwriting is a normal practice that has existed since ancient times, an aboveboard cooperation, not laziness, not deception, let alone so-called utilitarianism.

The emergence of AI chatbots has completely changed the landscape.

Image source: Generated by Doubao AI

AI enables ordinary people to have their own exclusive ghostwriters for free.

Josh Lisek, a professional ghostwriter, pointed out the future trend bluntly: if traditional human ghostwriting does not want to be eliminated, it can only transform into high-end niche services that exclusively serve wealthy people.

Where is the boundary between assistance and fraud?

In fact, no matter whether you pay others to write for you or use AI for free assistance, seeking help from others and polishing works through cooperation in the creation process is not an unethical thing in itself.

The essential job of editors is to help authors polish and adjust manuscripts; artists all have assistants to help handle basic work; TV drama scripts are even polished collectively by the entire screenwriting team. Creation has never been a completely isolated act.

The same logic applies to the campus nowadays.

Most teachers can accept that students use ChatGPT to modify grammar, polish articles and adjust logic, but they absolutely do not recognize that students directly let AI write the entire assignment and generate homework with one click.

Many universities now allow the use of AI tools, but they have strict mandatory requirements: you must check the correctness of the AI-generated content by yourself, and actively mark and explain the traces of AI use.

Even if you have marked and checked the content, there are clear regulations: you must never submit the AI-generated content as your own original achievements entirely.

Neither the content written by others nor the content written by AI can be passed off as your own.

This set of rules is almost exactly the same as the industry contract for human ghostwriting. Human ghostwriting will sign an "originality guarantee", promising that the content is original and free of plagiarism, and will also use professional duplication checking tools for self-inspection. Once factual errors or plagiarism occur, the ghostwriter himself will basically take the responsibility.

Human ghostwriters take responsibility voluntarily, and the use of AI only needs to be clearly marked and truthfully explained, which is supposed to fully comply with the rules.

However, even though Vanderbilt University truthfully marked that "this email was written with the assistance of ChatGPT", it still suffered strong resentment and doubts from all teachers and students of the university.

In the final analysis, school rules and contracts can put a legal and compliant coat on this behavior to avoid legal risks. But the bottom line of readers and the public has never changed: what we want to read is the sincere thoughts of the signatory.