In the case of a ghostwriter, a novel was still written by a human -- just not necessarily the human whose name is on the cover. A ghostwritten song is still a song created by a human... I don't know how common ghostwriting is for songs; it's common for artists to record songs written by someone else, but I'm not sure how common it is for artists to use a ghostwriter for that without giving any credit at all.

"A greater general awareness and vigilance of whether authorship/provenance is suspect or not, is not a bad thing in my view."

Greater scrutiny of journalism, etc., is definitely to be desired. What is not to be desired is yet another reason why people cannot trust a fundamental thing like "the author who claims to have written this actually wrote this".

I've gotten to the point that I am having to question "should I consider reading this book or is it slop?" for anything published past about 2024, and I don't really appreciate that.

As someone who works with freelance authors, I now have to wade through far more pitches than before and probably 90% are LLM generated. And I have to worry with new authors that they'll use LLMs to generate content -- something our subscribers would very much not appreciate if we let one through. (Miss me with any "if it's good, it doesn't matter" takes. It very much matters. We pay people to research and write articles, and our subscribers pay us in part because they trust that humans are behind the content we publish.)

It sucks to have yet one more reason to distrust others. There were far too many as it was.