My son wrote a piece for the Plough about AI: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/maniacal-visions

I'm fascinated by the fact that your GW didn't want credit.

Ghostwriting is essentially giving up all rights to your work and that means putting it out of your control.

It could be as simple as not wanting to compete with yourself.  If someone pays you to write a book for them where they will own all the rights, if your name is on it, that book will come up in searches on your name.  If someone buys that book, you get nothing because you already got paid.  Maybe the person that bought it is an exceptional marketer, so 9 out of 10 Bill Hiatt books sold are that one you wrote for him.  So, 9 out of 10 times, you're missing out on a book sale.

Or, if you write about children's books and someone pays you to write a book that would be inappropriate for children, you probably wouldn't want to risk your readers buying that book by mistake.

Or, let's say you wrote a book for a celebrity but, instead of ghostwriting it, you insisted on at least being credited as a co-writer.  And then let's say the celebrity goes off the deep-end and does something horrific.  You might not want to be forever associated with that person even if you had, and especially if you had, nothing to do with the horrific thing they did.

Or, let's say you wrote an article about the history of mince pie and how to prepare it.  And it's to be published under your name.  And let's say the buyer puts it on a website catering to cannibals and they also have instructions on how to render suet from children to use in mince pie.  You probably would not want to be associated with that.

Plenty of reasons a ghostwriter might not want their name attached to something they wrote.

I've no idea how to use AI so I haven't tried it. But knowing that trad publisher's use blurb writers to write their blurbs (very grateful that I didn't have to write them for my own trad published books ) and learning how difficult it is, I wouldn't consider it 'cheating' to use AI for blurb writing. But I'm not sure how comfortable I would be using it to write the actual book. However, if I did know how to use it I might be tempted when struggling with descriptions of scenery, which I hate writing, and like a crossword puzzle, when after struggling I finally give up and look up the answer I might be tempted to try AI.

I think a lot of people wouldn't want slavery used because stretching the definition too far causes the word to lose some of its impact.

The flip side of that is that we don't want to make slavery or forms of slavery acceptable by redefining it as something else.

Not compensating people for their work is pretty harsh.

Not compensating people for their work and using their work to help create additional works for financial gain is even harsher.

Not compensating people for their work and using their work to help create additional works for financial gain and that compete with and reduce the market value of their work is really harsh.

If using someone's labor without their permission and without compensating them for their work is not a form of slavery, then can it be described as theft?

Theft is a more applicable term.

I think a lot of people wouldn't want slavery used because stretching the definition too far causes the word to lose some of its impact. Jewish people have been complaining for a long time that comparing every political thing we don't like to Nazi Germany reduces the impact of the Holocaust, trivializing it.

I can see that point when I look at contemporary America. Without take sides on any of the issues, if we take all the statements being made at face value, every political figure is either a socialist or a facist--or perhaps both. In a decade, such terms will have lost most of their original meaning because they've been applied to too many things.