Happy Wednesday,
Jake is back this week, and he came back from the woods thinking about a new term: ghost creators.
It's the missing category in a framework he's been trying to articulate for years. The paid, faceless talent that brands and (in the darkest version of this, political operators) hire to say exactly what they're told, with no audience or public identity of their own.
This week we dig into a Semafor investigation into a network of hundreds of YouTube channels using AI-written scripts and $26 Fiverr actors to manufacture political news at scale, and what it means for creators, platforms, and the rest of us going forward.
If AI, with the help of a $26 Fiverr actor, can generate more views than me, what is my value as a creator?
How They Got Here: What Are Ghost Creators?
Jake's four categories: He's spent years trying to define this and finally landed on the missing piece. Influencers/celebrities are famous for something outside content creation (an athlete, a Jenner sister). Content creators built an audience through skill at the craft itself. UGC creators are real users making authentic testimonial content about a product they actually use. Ghost creators are the new fourth category: skilled, camera-ready people with zero public following who get hired to perform someone else's brief.
The line between UGC and ghost content: It comes down to who writes the script. Real UGC is a customer talking about a product because they genuinely love it. Ideally, the brand didn't even prompt it. The moment a brand hands someone a brief and says, "say this, do it this way," it crosses into ghost content, even if the final video is styled to look organic.
Where the line started to blur: I trace it back to TikTok Shop. Brands didn't need to script creators directly; they just set commission rates and let creators chase whichever product paid best. That infrastructure quietly turned "I found a product I like" into "I found the product with the best payout," without anyone technically writing a script.
Where it stands today: Platforms like Trybe now exist purely for creators to make content at a brand's direction, which then runs as paid advertising. At that point, I argue, it has fully jumped the shark — from a one-to-one authentic relationship to a scaled, brand-directed business—which sets up the darker use case: political ghost-creator networks manufacturing "news" at scale.
The Big Idea: Manufacturing News > Reporting News
The Semafor investigation centers on a network of over 500 ghost creators run by a guy named Caleb Chan, built to dodge YouTube's AI-detection systems. Fully AI-generated videos kept getting flagged and taken down, so Chan pivoted: keep the AI-written scripts, but pay a real human $26 a video on Fiverr to read them on camera. That was enough to slip past the filters.
Chan then discovered that if 150+ seemingly unrelated channels posted about the same topic around the same time, YouTube's algorithm would read it as a real “breaking news” signal and elevate all videos on the topic. He openly bragged about this strategy on Twitter earlier this year:
“okay interesting discovery: if 26 accounts post the same # within 10 minutes, the algorithm thinks it’s ‘breaking news’ pushes everything to trending. tested this 9 times with my ghost creators and I’m going VIRAL because of it manufacturing news > reporting news.”
It worked well enough that, by his own account, his network outdrew legitimate outlets like The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe and more. Still, to me, that’s not the scariest part.
Because even though Chan’s 100+ political channels, Twitter account, and company website have all been taken down or removed since Semafor’s reporting earlier this month, he openly bragged about running over 500 “ghost creator” channels in different verticals:
“We’re diversified, no single issue will knock the tower down, I lost 95% of my channels in January.”
Not to be all doom and gloom, but how many more networks like this are out there that we don’t know about yet?
5 Tactical Takeaways
Know your four categories. Influencer/celebrity, content creator, UGC creator, ghost creator. Clear definitions make it much easier to brief a brand, a client, or your own team on what kind of talent a project actually needs.
Ghost creators aren't inherently bad. Used well, they're an efficient way for a brand to get a clear message out through a real person, without needing that person to be an actual customer or public figure. The category itself isn't the problem.
The line is who's writing the script. The moment a brand, not the user, controls the message, you've left UGC territory and entered ghost-content territory, regardless of how authentic the final video looks.
Human experience becomes the moat. As AI and cheap ghost-creator labor close the gap on views and speed, the thing that can't be replicated is a real, verifiable perspective and lived experience. That's the differentiator creators should be building toward.
Know which race you're actually in. If your value proposition is being first (breaking the news, posting the fastest recap), that lane is the most exposed to being replicated cheaply by AI-assisted networks. If your value is perspective, story, or editing quality, speed was never the point, so don't let it distract you.
Why It Matters
Ghost creators aren't new so much as newly named, and once you have the word for it, you start seeing the category everywhere, from a $100 “UGC” ad to a 500-account political disinformation network.
The tool itself is neutral; what matters is who's holding the pen on the script, and whether the platforms and regulators treat synthetic-at-scale content with the same seriousness they'd apply to a fake TV commercial.
For creators, the takeaway cuts even closer to home: if a Fiverr actor and an AI script can out-produce you on speed and volume, the only lane that's actually yours is the one built on real, human perspective.
📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.
See you then,
Tyler & Jake