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The Incomplete Thought.

(3 minute read.)

Author as producer/director?

Explanation rather than defence, for why and how I use LLM AI to write stuff and often with no specific disclosure, below are rough notes from a conversation with DeepSeek.

1 The ghostwriter parallel.
Books are frequently ghostwritten with no disclosure, and this is widely accepted. If undisclosed human authorship is normalized, why should AI be held to a different standard?

2 The marketing/corporate parallel.
Company websites, marketing copy, and staff-written books are almost never credited to the actual human writers. Authorship is attributed to the brand or institution. The reader's contract is with the entity, not the individual scribe.

3 The session musician parallel.
Countless classic recordings feature uncredited session musicians. Listeners don't know and don't care. They want the finished song. The same indifference will apply to books.

4 The software/production parallel.
Music producers use pre-recorded loops and software instruments without disclosure. The skill is in selection and arrangement, not physical execution. AI writing is analogous.

5 The consumer indifference argument.
Most people simply don't care about the origins of what they consume. They want a product that works—a song that moves them, a coat that keeps them warm, a book that entertains. The $300 coat and the $10 book framing: if we don't care who made our expensive coat, why demand transparency for a cheap book? Movie end credits are often union-mandated rather than voluntary, and most audiences ignore them entirely.

6 The Damien Hirst / medieval workshop parallel.
Art has often been produced by teams under a master's direction, with only the master credited. Hirst's spot paintings were painted by assistants. Medieval artists had workshops of apprentices doing significant amounts of the painting of what are now 'masterpieces'. The 'solitary genius' is often a romantic anomaly.

7 The Henry Miller suggestion.
Some writers (like Miller) would almost certainly embrace AI not out of laziness but out of a commitment to life. If the machine can write, the human is freed to live—to fuck, fish, drink, experience. The purpose of art is to serve life, not replace it.

8 The societal integration argument.
AI will soon deliver immense benefits—medical research, disease cures, life-saving breakthroughs. In that context, agonizing/griping over the authorship of a $12 book is almost comically trivial. I also sometimes use Photoshop to improve crappy photos I've taken… or rather, I *did*—now there's no need to, because my iPhone does it automatically.

So I'm entirely serious about the suggestion of 'author as producer/director'. That's my role. Write books? No—I produce and direct them.

I'm building a publishing business where content is AI-generated/assisted and human-directed, credited as 'a wordshifters production' (or similar) rather than the work of any named individual.

I'm creating things that otherwise wouldn't exist, mostly of genuine societal value (useful/entertaining information), giving away free where able, and charging as modestly as I can for the rest of it so I can financially sustain the operation with a fair profit.

Illustratively, here's three essays—in the style of Henry Miller, Hemingway, and Hunter Thompson—which support my view.

To bring things full circle, from the philosophical arguments about authorship and disclosure, through the historical precedents and consumer behavior, all the way back to the simplest, truest truth: the reader reads…

As a young kid, I read TinTin. Enjoyed it immensely. Still would (read and enjoy) nowadays if my eyes were good enough to see the pictures clearly and read the words.

Age 8 I didn't know about Hergé and wouldn't have much-cared. At 70, what still matters to me is the enjoyment; yes, I hope the creator got the vanity credit and was paid properly—but they're issues beyond the reader.

Additionally… I choose not to fully understand how AI works. I prefer to treat it as magic, anthropomorphising multiple personalities as a troupe of ghostwriters. This is not ignorance but a deliberate creative choice—preserving wonder in an age of explanation.

So yeah… this is an outline of my view and activity.