V.C. Andrews died in 1986.
Since then, more than 100 novels have been published under her name by ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman. Most readers either never noticed or didn't care. The books still had the gothic families, dark secrets, and familiar atmosphere people expected from a V.C. Andrews novel.
It got me thinking about something we're starting to see with AI.
When people ask whether AI can continue the work of a deceased author, musician, or artist, they're treating it as a brand-new question. But publishing has already been running a real-world experiment for nearly 40 years.
A dead author's name remained on the cover. Someone else learned the style, themes, and formula. New works were produced for an audience that wanted more of the same. The franchise continued.
The obvious difference is that Neiderman was a human ghostwriter and an AI model isn't. But from the perspective of readers, what exactly is the meaningful distinction?
If a future "new" novel by a deceased author is good enough that readers enjoy it and can't tell the difference, should we care how it was produced? Or is there something fundamentally different about a human ghostwriter carrying on a literary legacy versus a model trained on the author's corpus?
I wrote a longer piece about the V.C. Andrews case and why it feels relevant to the future of AI-generated creative work:
https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/the-ghost-in-the-machine-has-been
Curious where people here draw the line.
[link] [comments]