Ghosting The Machine

What happens when the machine learns your voice?

Ghosting the Machine explores the strange, exhilarating and deeply unsettling experience of creating with artificial intelligence. From books and digital learning to music, film and design, AI can now imitate our style, extend our ideas and produce in minutes what once demanded months of work.

But when the result is brilliant, who deserves the credit?

Drawing on his experience as a writer, songwriter and digital learning designer, David Mc Pherson examines the rapidly disappearing boundary between human creativity and machine production. He revisits songs recorded in 1998 and feeds them into an AI music composer, transforming forgotten demos into polished productions. The results are astonishing, but they raise an uncomfortable question: is the finished music still his?

This is not a book about rejecting AI. It is about using it without surrendering the imagination, experience and emotional truth that make creative work human.

Honest, provocative and grounded in real experimentation, Ghosting the Machine confronts the new authenticity crisis facing writers, musicians, designers and creators everywhere. It asks what authorship means when machines can write, compose, illustrate and speak for us.

The machine can reproduce your voice.

The real challenge is making sure it does not replace it.

David Mc Pherson is a learning and development leader and a digital learning designer with decades of experience creating learning solutions for global organisations.

He has built corporate academies, led international design teams, and developed digital learning for workforces of more than 35,000 employees across multiple countries and brands. His work spans leadership development, onboarding, compliance, professional skills training, product development, eLearning and AI-supported learning modules.

When he wanted to formalise decades of training experience with a Diploma in learning design, he was the first to achieve distinctions, in a cohort of 16, in each project assignment, another example of his passion for learning design pushing boundaries.

Having worked as an educator for his entire professional life, he combines practical experience with a deep interest in how people learn. He is particularly interested in the ways artificial intelligence is changing instructional design, workplace learning and the role of the modern learning professional, which led to his first book.

His writing challenges outdated approaches to elearning design and explores how organisations can use technology without losing the human purpose of learning.