Talk of the powers of artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous, from the rapturous to the apocalyptic. AI is somehow inevitable, disastrous, a failure, a replacement for human connection, a speculative bubble, a pathway toward human obsolescence. It is at once a fun tool, a scam, a spirit guide, regurgitated eugenics, a threat to our shared sense of reality, a revolutionary technology that will propel humanity to its next evolutionary form. It is a liar, a capitalist bait and switch, a means to undermine labor, a theft of intellectual property, an absolutely devastating assault on the environment and natural resources, a meme, a god, God. It will somehow change everything, or it changes nothing at all.

To work our way through this discombobulation, to confront, obliquely, the eeriness of artificial intelligence, we take ghostwriters as our entry point. Ghostwriters are authors who are not the author. Their skill lies in a spectral zone where fidelity and artifice shift from opposites into near-miss synonyms. Their generative acts are, at their core, the work of recomposing the fragments and nuances of a well of speech, mannerism, and data in order, paradoxically, to make it sound like itself.

Ghostwriters are often presumed to be at work even when they are unacknowledged, revealing the problem of authorship to be a dance around open secrets. They disrupt the stability of authenticity, and they splinter the unity of voice into a configurational problem: something to be captured through its ineffability. Ghostwriters occupy the voices of others, an orchestra masquerading with a knowing wink as a single instrument.

The array of ghostwriters in this issue shake AI, and especially large language models, off of the pedestals that breathless and apocalyptic accounts have built, resituating machine intelligence amidst a crowd of other spooky presences and practices that appear just as they disappear from view. Ghostwriting is a meticulously honed skill, a profession with its own rapidly changing political economies, and a portal into questions of displaced agency and the hauntings conjured by this moment. Ghostwriters are alternately workers and channels for something more—a hoax or a wide-open secret. They work behind the scenes to make their clients sound more like themselves, or rather, projections of the self, but with more literary panache. This occupation of voices blurs the lines between technique and technology, an author and the very idea of authorship. Thinking about ghostwriters forces us into the proximity of ghosts of many kinds. Agency becomes an occasion for panic, and reality is regenerated over and over, in iterations that build on other iterations.

Ghostwriters!, Limn’s lucky thirteenth issue, seeks ways into our hallucinatory contemporary. Occupying the voice of another, human imitation, bodies animated by uncertain agencies—these are nothing new, and yet somehow AI is exhilarating, menacing, and spooky all the same. Strong claims of technological triumph skid when they collide with the enduring legacies of race and technology, diaspora and war.

We have built this issue as a haunted house. Each entry is a room that invites you to commune with a distinct ghost and its manner of haunting. By tracing alternative genealogies and shadow histories, we set out to illuminate the deep-seated fragility within the legal and conceptual cosmology of modernity, while unveiling the hauntings in the endless churn of generative output. A haunted house is a space for increasingly implausible realities, rather than irreality. In their partial disjoining from what they are compiled from, these alter-realities beckon us to contend with the possibility that, among ghostwriters, the real and the surreal are not opposites, but a progressive series of iterative versions of each other.

The rhetorical spectacle of technological exceptionalism centers on AI’s supposedly revolutionary features, but the composite voice of everything from chatbots to artificial neural networks is not so easily distinguishable from its antecedents. The ghostwriter—not quite mimic, not quite liar—decenters artificiality and intelligence to rewire authorship, representation, learning, and data into a circuit of as-ifs and near-enough approximations. These are the places, reader, where the veil gets thin, and the confident dystopianism of AI utopia finds its place among other ghosts, hauntings, and uncanny creatures.

There are machines and there are their ghosts; what happens when we commune with these entities simultaneously? What can be generated besides algorithmic outputs, hallucinations, and an endless reshuffle of partial worlds? And what lingers in the code that makes AI not a proof of technological advancement or a road to apocalypse, and, instead, a realm of ghostly presences? In this issue, investigating ghostwriting resituates the singularity of artificial intelligence within a multiverse of oblique timelines. The ghosts here are not the same; neither are the ways they haunt.

In the chambers of the haunted house that ensues, we invite you to ponder not the corruption of a first, pure reality, but rather to linger on how ghostwritings generate an array of more or less plausible irrealities, and a glimpse of the realities that can be configured when another is stripped for parts. Reality is not a primordial pool of data for a training algorithm; it is not the raw material out of which false worlds are generated. Where ghosts write, reality is a permutational achievement or an instructive failure; it multiplies, captivates, and rots in its iteration and circulation. There is pleasure and protection in the performance, in knowing that the machine is speaking while also not speaking. Like other ghostwriters, AI’s capacity cannot be captured in the distinction between authenticity and artifice, but rather in the kinds of work it takes to make one’s presence palpable by erasing it.