In many commercial and franchise lines, the plot isn’t devised by the cover name either. There’s a series bible, templates, and strict rules, and the brand “author” signs off while editors, ghostwriters, and plotters do the assembly-line labour. In some legacy series, a house pseudonym covers an interchangeable roster of ghosts whose job is to mimic a style that readers imagine is one person’s “voice.”

Publishing handles this with work-for-hire and ghostwriting contracts: the person doing the writing signs away copyright, credit, and often any claim on spin‑offs. If that ghosted book is optioned for a series, film, or game, the brand name gets the glory and the cheques, not the person who actually did the creative heavy lifting.

The same thing happens in parts of the art world under similar contracts. The public is sold a romantic story about individual genius, while the paperwork quietly routes ownership and money elsewhere. So when some of these brand names rail about AI scraping “their” words, it’s worth asking whose labour and ideas they’ve already been treating as invisible.

For the record: I have never used a ghostwriter on any of my books, and none of them were written with AI. I do use AI now, and I label it (I wrote the original without AI, but Perplexity made suggestions for something punchier, which I used), because readers deserve to know what they’re looking at. I’ve always been transparent; some of the loudest public critics of AI have not been, and not everyone who knows how the machine really runs is locked down by an NDA.