AI Is the Perfect Tool for Celebrity Christian "Authors"

The publishing industry has ceded so much ground to high-profile authors who don't or can't write. What grounds do we have to now ask that they not use AI?

Housekeeping note: In my most recent Substack, I said I would be gone for a few months to prepare for my July wedding, and was pausing paid subscriptions. Well, something got stuck in my craw. When that happens, writing is the outlet. (Paid subscriptions are still paused!) -KB

5/21/2026 update: This article has been edited.

Recently, in my work as an acquisitions editor, I received a book proposal that looked promising. The author was doing all the things the publishing industry tells authors to do: build your platform; lean on your relational networks; stay focused on your core message. I became intrigued when the proposal claimed that their Substack was growing and had high engagement rates.

Image: Igor Omilaev / Unsplash

I’ve started to pay more attention to Substack as a way of gauging an author’s potential. The platform is centered on writing rather than viral moments or reactive memes, and readers are opting in to reading your writing, rather than doomscrolling across your post. Some Substack subscribers value your writing enough to pay for it — which in theory means they’ll value it enough to buy your book. It also gets writers in the habit of writing regularly, which is a helpful skill for writing a whole book.

Substack is far from perfect. In the past couple years, I’ve noticed more marketing and self-help gurus flooding my feeds. It’s a place where people plagiarize other people’s words without consequence; Andy Squyres recently noted that a person writing under the name “The Biblical Man” was taking Andy’s writing from Instagram and claiming it as his own on Substack and Twitter. But, in a sea of bad social media options, it’s one of the less bad ones.

When I began exploring this author’s Substack, though, something seemed off.

A Crucial Tool for Editors: The AI Spidey Sense

Despite what the proposal claimed, I didn’t see evidence of a growing subscriber base or high engagement. Then again, book proposals regularly exaggerate, so I kept reading.

That’s when my AI writing spidey sense started tingling.

The sentences all had the cadence of marketing speak. There was no personal subject. There were all the three-point lists.

And short paragraphs like this.

Absent was the author’s personal perspective and place in time. There was a sense of “the text being uninhabited,” as Jonathan Rowson recently said. There weren’t any human errors like typos or clunky sentences.

As many editors will tell you, figuring out whether an author has used a large language model (LLM), such as ChatGPT or Claude, to generate writing usually starts with a hunch. It’s a good place to start, but only that. There are several online AI detector tools available, but none are 100% accurate or definitive, and sometimes they produce false positives. In my view, this is one of the most urgent needs for the book publishing industry (as well as higher education). If we’re going to commit to only publishing books created by human minds and hands, then we need a tool that can spot the machines with certainty. Our industry depends on it, especially as AI gets better and slicker. Don’t all of us want jobs in 20 years?

I copy and pasted several long passages from the author’s Substack into four to five AI detector tools. One came back as “human writing detected,” while the other four came back as anywhere from a 58 to 100 percent likelihood that the text was AI generated.

As I realized that it was more likely my spidey sense + the online AI detectors were telling me the truth than that this person just happened to write like AI — several emotions washed over me.

First, I was disappointed; guess we won’t be publishing this person anytime soon. To paraphrase Jesus, whoever can’t be trusted with the little task of writing a 1,000-word essay can’t be trusted with the large task of writing a book (Luke 16:10).

Next, I started to question other things in the proposal. If an author is willing to deceive about their writing — for prompting an LLM to create writing for you that you then claim as your own creative work is deceptive — are they also being deceptive about other elements of the proposal?

Image: 愚木混株 Yumu / Unsplash

But the primary emotion I felt was anger.

I felt mad that this person seemed to be taking an ethical shortcut in the name of Christian ministry.

I felt mad on behalf of the authors who are out there hustling — putting pen to paper, trying to carve out time when life splinters their attention, reading and thinking deeply, plus posting on social media and networking and attending writing conferences — who are trying to do this work with an undivided heart.

I felt mad that the author seemed to think landing a book deal was about things other than the actual writing.

And, whether this is prideful, I’m not sure: I felt mad on a personal level, because I’ve spent my adult life trying to become a good writer.

It’s an imperfect metaphor, but think of a chef working in the restaurant industry. They graduated from culinary school. They’ve worked late nights in demanding kitchens. They’ve had their food criticized in front of peers. Yet still they show up and put in the work — not to become a “celebrity chef,” but because they love food. They love the blend of flavors and textures. They relish the delight and joy that their cooking brings to people. And they take satisfaction in knowing they’ve grown in their skills and developed some respect among their industry peers.

But now a new chef shows up to the restaurant with an impressive-seeming resume. They have personal flair, claim connections with high-level chefs, and have developed a bit of a following. But when they start cooking, their meals taste … off. Processed, like something a microwave could pop out. The food looks good, but when you take a bite, it’s missing that essential quality that’s hard to describe but unmistakeable when it’s absent: human ingenuity.

So, we might understand why the professional chef would take issue with the new chef in town: Because their fake cooking mocks the creative work they love and have devoted their lives to.

Photo by Lucas Law on Unsplash

The Responsibility of Book Publishers

How should the publishing industry respond to all of this? First there is the issue of intellectual property. LLMs are trained using massive data sets of books and articles scraped from the Internet. So at root, prompting an LLM to write, then present whatever it churns out as your own work, is intellectual theft. If a book author includes AI writing in their manuscript, then fundamentally a publisher can’t copyright it.

As I’ve written about before, some major publishers have filed lawsuits against AI firms that have built their models using their own books and articles.

There is also the quality control issue. For now, at least, most book buyers don’t want AI books. They want books written by humans, and trust publishers as gatekeepers in this regard. To return to the culinary metaphor: People who eat at nice restaurants are paying for meals prepared by trained, talented humns. They trust they aren’t being served microwave meals, which is something they could easily buy from Kroger and eat at home. If patrons found out a respected restaurant was serving them microwave dinners, the restaurant would be done-zo.

In March, Hachette canceled Shy Girl, a horror novel set to release this spring, after a series of online allegations that the author had used AI to write the book. She said that she hadn’t, but that “an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.” The more that publishers let AI books slip through, the more they will lose bookbuyers’ trust and tank their own future.

Readers reasonably expect publishers to vet authors, because publishing a book can give someone a platform, notoriety, and revenue streams that they wouldn’t otherwise have. In other words, a book extends an author’s authority and power. Vetting takes on a spiritual tinge in Christian book publishing. To be sure, a publisher needn’t know an author’s personal life intimately, and publishers get duped too. But for the sake of their own reputation, a publisher ought to care about an author’s creative integrity.

When an author is claiming to be a spiritual authority figure, then deceptively passes off writing churned out by ChatGPT as their own, profiting from the deception in the form of the advance, royalties, speaking engagements, and so on, their publisher becomes complicit in the deception.

But I worry that the industry has already ceded too much ground. As I spent a chapter outlining in Celebrities for Jesus, the Christian publishing industry “hasn’t been able to resist the ascendancy of celebrity in a consumerist culture.” Platforms still play an outsize role in who gets a book deal, because that’s what sells books. At the end of the day, publishing is a business, and businesses exist to create profit.

Books As Products

In the world of Christian celebrity, books are just one piece of a multi-pronged media strategy to extend the celebrity’s reach and credibility. Books aren’t creative works; they are products. They are units to be bought and sold to spiritual consumers who are drawn to the name on the cover.

Photo by Mahmudul Hasan on Unsplash

Ghostwriting is already a common practice in book publishing. Imagine you’re a busy pastor with a growing church. You have a nonstop speaking schedule, a staff to lead, a weekly sermon to preach, a family to care for, and a publisher approaches you with six-figure book deal, writing unseen. You figure you can reach so many more people with a book than you could in person or across media channels. The book — still an amazing technology! — would give you a kind of gravitas that a podcast doesn’t. As I note in C4J, evangelicals of the past century have been progressive and pragmatic in adopting new technologies, if it means one more person might hear the gospel.

The problem is, you just don’t have time to write. And you’re a much better speaker than a writer, anyway. The publisher offers to connect you with a “writing assistant” who can work with you to craft your book. Of course you will pay them; but you — and the publisher! — wouldn’t imagine putting their name on the cover as a coauthor, because everyone understands your name is what will sell the book.

This is what happened with Mark Driscoll and his “citation errors” back in 2013. To his church, he gave thanks for two named writing assistants, for helping him create a Bible study. “I am now sending out literally thousands of pages of content a year, as well as preaching and teaching hundreds of hours of content a year,” he preened. But as Andy Crouch noted, their names never appeared in the final work.

Crouch writes:

“Pastor Mark Driscoll,” the author of "literally thousands of pages of content a year,” the purveyor of hundreds of hours of preaching, is in grave danger of becoming a false image. No human being could do what “Pastor Mark Driscoll” does—the celebrity is actually a complex creation of a whole community of people who sustain the illusion of an impossibly productive, knowledgeable, omnicompetent superhuman.

Using AI tools, celebrity Christians and celebrity-hopeful Christians can tap into “a whole community of people” whose creative work has been used to build these LLMs. But with ChatGPT or Claude, there is no one you need to pay, and no on you need to thank. You can cut out the middleman and just hope the publisher and bookbuyers don’t pick up on it

***

I mentioned the disappointment, suspicion, and anger that washed over me reading this proposal. But as I thought about what the author was trying to do, I also felt some pity.

Authors who are tempted to use AI to write their work are enacting a crucial piece of the evangelical ethos: Technology is a neutral tool that justifies itself with ministry results. It doesn’t matter how we get there, as long as the technology bears fruit. Authors who do this are doing only Christian book publishers have told them to do: secure your platform and appearance of renown to get the book deal, and the writing can come later.

Any author’s decision to use AI to create writing is solely their own. But we as an industry made that decision really easy. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see author-hopefuls treat writing as an afterthought. We created the AI writing deception problem, and today, we are woefully equipped to deal with to deal with it. As soon as book publishing became more about selling products that creating beautiful books, we had already lost the game. —KB