A Ghostwriter’s Lament

Artificial intelligence, ethics, Italy, and the end of critical thought

The best-paying job I had in college was as a kind of black-market ghostwriter — a euphemism meaning I produced custom term papers and other writing assignments for my fellow students for a negotiated fee.

It paid much, much more than my main job at The Florida Flambeau, the student-run newspaper, or my role as a sports “stringer” for regional newspapers, and it beat the long hours I spent in restaurant kitchens or waiting tables.

I think I wrote at least 60 of these illicit papers. I still remember many of the topics: tribes of the Amazon Jungle, the Biblical Apocrypha, Nelson Mandela. There were Florida-related topics including Ponce de León, John Gorrie, Claude Pepper, the Battle of Natural Bridge, and the Seminole Indians. I wrote about philosophy in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and a comparison of reformers Martin Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam.

I justified the work by arguing that I was getting a better education by researching and writing about so many topics. I also thought I was striking a blow against “credentialism” -- the notion that people were judged by their formal credentials rather than by their abilities or character.

But the real reason is that I needed the money.

For Pete’s sake

For all intents and purposes, I was a primitive version of the essay-writing function on ChatGPT, slower and more expensive, with glasses, a goatee, and a library card.

My best customer was a guy I’ll call Pete.

The author as a black-market ghostwriter. Note Hans Küng’s Does God Exist? and a bottle of Dom Perignon being used as a candle holder on the table (EJL photo)

Pete (not his real name) was a psychology major who first came to me looking for a “really awesome” term paper about Skinner Boxes. He got a good grade and came back for more.

Down the line, one of his psychology professors told Pete that although he had a “knack for writing,” his test scores were weak. Maybe he should change majors. And Pete, always deferential, announced he was switching to English -- my major! I carried him.

With all my side hustles, I never took a full course load, and so Pete matriculated faster than I did. He was set to graduate when I still had a couple of semesters to go.

“Have you given any thought to what you’ll do after graduation?” a professor asked Pete at the end of one of our classes.

“Not really.”

“What about getting a master’s degree?”

Pete was lazy, not stupid, and so his decision surprised me. “Listen, man, I’m outta here in two semesters!” I told him. “What are you going to do then?”

“It’s not that hard,” Pete said. “I’ve seen you do it. You just sit down and write. Anyone can do that.”

Martin Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam

I squeezed Pete for as much as I could before leaving him to his fate. I had no idea what happened to him until around 15 years later, when there was a brief flurry of commentary on Facebook around a newspaper story about Pete, who had been fired from a job he somehow landed as a school evaluator.

A chill ran down my spine as I read it.

The erosion of thought

Pete would spend two or three days at a school and then file a report explaining its strengths and the areas that needed improvement.

As part of the process, he’d meet with the school principal and some teachers and department heads and ask them to submit a report about what they thought were the school’s strengths and weaknesses. Then he’d turn those reports in as his own work. He was analogue but still getting other people to write for him.

I now regret writing all those papers. Yes, I made good money, and sure, it was interesting to research and write about so many diverse topics. But I wasn’t weakening the notion of “credentialism” as much as I was propping it up while sending a platoon of the unprepared into a world of real consequences.

This is what I fear about artificial intelligence.

I know my sense of direction has atrophied due to Google Maps (just as other skills have been made redundant by Autotune, spellcheck, and calculators). Now other, more critical abilities are now disappearing.

I’ve read expert columns that worry about AI taking jobs and spreading misinformation, about surveillance and discrimination, about an existential threat to humanity. Maybe. I don’t know if AI will destroy us, but it seems assured that those who’ll have to confront big threats in the future will do so without the critical thinking, problem solving, and historical context they’d outsourced to their computers.

‘Of New Things’

Improbably, Italy -- a country known for ancient ruins, not a vibrant tech sector, one that in modern times limps from crisis to crisis -- is on the front lines of the global debate on artificial intelligence. It is perhaps the first country to grapple with the technology’s ethical and social implications.

In 2023, Italy was the first nation to temporarily ban ChatGPT and it did the same this year with China’s DeepSeek. Both cases related to privacy concerns, helping to chart the course of the European Union’s policy in this area. As such, Italy was an architect of the EU’s AI Act, the world’s first legislative framework for AI, and domestically, it has incentivized the use of AI for historical and cultural preservation, rather than focusing purely on its commercial applications as in the U.S., China, and elsewhere.

Italy’s logo for its G7 presidency last year

Last year, while holding the presidency of the Group of Seven countries, Italy hosted the first-ever G7 summit on developing an AI rulebook (Canada will follow suit this year). In Italy there has also been lively debate among universities and trade unions about AI’s role.

Even the Vatican -- which sees itself as a global “voice of conscience” -- is prepared to play a role. Newly installed Pope Leo XIV said he chose his papal name largely because of Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), that addressed moral questions surrounding the industrial revolution. Today, he said, we face a different industrial revolution related to “developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.”

Post-scriptum:

The most long-lasting impact from my days as a criminal term paper writer involved the renegade Swiss theologian Hans Küng. I received a copy of Does God Exist? as an impromptu gift from my cousin John, a priest, who had given up on reading it.

The thick tome would probably have remained untouched on my bookshelf if it weren’t for the paper I wrote comparing Luther and Erasmus, the 16th-century Christian reformers (both started out as Augustinians, an order I wrote about two weeks ago). Luckily for me, Does God Exist? includes a detailed index, which meant I could easily flip to the passages I needed (In short: Küng thought Luther was too confrontational; Erasmus more balanced).

Küng was one of Catholicism’s great modern minds. He was the youngest formal participant in the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s -- a year younger than his friend and fellow progressive Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. Both taught at Tübingen University, but their paths diverged after the 1968 riots that shook Europe.

Küng -- like Luther, confrontational -- evolved into a vocal critic of the Vatican, particularly over papal infallibility, which he called a “political tool.” In 1979, a young Pope John Paul II revoked the theologian’s Catholic license to teach -- a dramatic rebuke. Afterwards, John Paul rejected more than a dozen of Küng’s appeals to meet.

Hans Küng in the 1980s (NYT photo)

When Ratzinger became pope in 2005, I contacted Küng for comment and to my surprise, he responded. We exchanged a few courteous emails and talked twice by phone, discussing (truth be told, he did most of the talking) Italian food, Wolfgang Mozart, Islam, Immanuel Kant, and even the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. I called him “professor.” He was opinionated, but he never told me anything too controversial.

Later, I read that Küng had been invited to Castel Gandolfo to meet with Benedict, five months into his papacy. There was speculation Benedict might reinstate his old friend’s license to teach. According to Küng, the two spoke warmly for four hours but never embraced (“We Germans are not as expansive as the Latins,” he reportedly said). There was no rapprochement.

Over time, Küng became a critic of Benedict, comparing him at one point to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and saying that the pontiff was “living intellectually in the Middle Ages.” And when Benedict became the first pope to step down in nearly 600 years, I wrote to Küng for the final time, though he politely declined to comment. A few weeks later, someone on his staff later emailed me an article Küng wrote praising Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis.

Küng, brilliant, opinionated, and stubborn, no matter what the cost, died in 2021 at the age of 93 (Benedict followed 18 months later).