The question of authorship has always been a complex and nuanced one. For centuries, words have moved through voices that were not always their own. Kings and queens once dictated proclamations that scribes transcribed into lofty prose. Politicians, celebrities, and business leaders today release memoirs that were crafted in the shadows by ghostwriters. Even in African literary traditions, communal storytelling often blurred the lines of ownership, as folktales belonged to the people, not to the individual. However, in the age of artificial intelligence, we are now faced with a new variation of an old puzzle – if a machine helps craft a story, a poem, or a novel, should it be given credit as an author?
At first glance, the answer may appear simple. Authorship is bound to agency, to consciousness, to the unique spark of human imagination. A ghostwriter is still human, with memories, emotions, and lived experience that shape the rhythm of their sentences. A politician may never touch the manuscript of their own memoir, but behind those words lies another human being who understood the power of longing, ambition, and failure. AI, by contrast, has no childhood to draw upon, no broken heart to remember, no ancestral memory to echo through its prose. Its sentences may dazzle with coherence, but they are the echoes of patterns rather than the pulse of life.
The challenge, however, arises when the lines between human and machine blur. If a poet uses an AI tool to polish her verse, is the resulting poem hers alone, or does the machine become a silent co-author? If a novelist generates entire chapters with the help of AI, can we still speak of a singular authorial voice? These questions are no longer hypothetical. Across the world, publishing houses and writers’ collectives are already grappling with manuscripts that bear invisible fingerprints of AI.
Unlike traditional ghostwriters, who often accept invisibility as part of their contract, AI presents a deeper ethical conundrum. A ghostwriter chooses anonymity while AI has no capacity to choose. A ghostwriter, on one hand, might later reveal themselves, staking a claim to recognition. AI, on the other hand, cannot demand acknowledgement; only the humans behind it can. As such, to credit AI as “author” risks diluting what authorship means: not just the act of producing words, but the act of weaving human struggle, memory, and desire into language.
African literature provides a compelling lens for this debate. When Chinua Achebe declared that the writer’s role is to help his society regain belief in itself, he spoke from the crucible of colonial disruption and cultural reclamation. That mission cannot be outsourced to an algorithm trained largely on global data sets that may not even understand the cadences of Igbo, Yoruba, or Swahili oral traditions. To, therefore, give AI the same status as a human author is to flatten the historical and cultural burden that human writers carry.
Yet, one might ask the question – is it not also true that many celebrated authors collaborate with tools, editors, and even collective memories? A griot draws on the wisdom of ancestors. A novelist may rely heavily on their editor to shape the final draft. Are these not forms of shared authorship? Indeed, the literary act has rarely been entirely solitary. Perhaps, the arrival of AI simply pushes us to more honestly acknowledge that writing has always been, in part, collaborative.
It is germane to note that the key distinction lies in accountability. When a ghostwriter produces a book, there is a human chain of responsibility – someone to be paid, someone to be critiqued, someone to be praised or held accountable for misrepresentation. When an AI produces a manuscript, who carries that burden? The programmer? The user? The company behind the algorithm? Credit without responsibility risks creating a hollow form of authorship, where words float free of the human consequences they carry.
There is also the matter of creativity itself. African writers from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie remind us that literature is not just ornamented language but a negotiation with history, identity, and power. A sentence could be described as a weapon, a balm, and a memory revived. To treat AI-generated text as equivalent to this kind of authorship risks confusing fluency with depth. A ghostwriter can channel the pain of exile, the joy of resistance, and the nuance of tradition. AI can only predict the next most likely word.
Conversely, this does not mean that AI has no place in the literary world. Like the printing press before it, it is a tool that may democratize access, amplify hidden voices, and transform how we think about craft. A wise writer may use AI as a mirror, a sparring partner, or even a provocateur. However, to grant it the full mantle of authorship is to forget that literature is more than arrangement.
The question then is not whether AI should be named as an author, as I believe it should not. Thus, the major concern revolves around how transparent we ought to be about its role in literary writing. Just as readers have a right to know when a politician’s memoir is ghostwritten, they may have a right to know when a machine has shaped a novel. This is hinged on the fact that authorship is as much about trust as it is about creation.
In the end, the “ghostwriters of the digital age” are not the machines, but we humans who wield them. We decide how much credit to give, how much responsibility to claim, and how much of our humanity to preserve in the process. Literature will survive AI, as it has survived every technological upheaval before. Whether it remains a vessel of human depth or becomes a hall of clever mirrors depends on the choices we make now.
.Akinrinde is a literary critic and fictional writer
