Yes. Executive ghostwriting is a long-established professional practice with a clear ethical standard: the executive's ideas, expertise, and judgment must be the source of the content, and the executive must review and approve every piece before it is published.
Leaders have worked with ghostwriters on speeches, books, columns, and public statements for as long as professional publishing has existed. The practice is standard because executives produce valuable expertise and judgment but do not always have the time or inclination to write polished long-form content themselves. The production of the draft is a different skill from the generation of the expertise. Separating them is legitimate.
The ethical question is not who produced the draft. It is whether the content reflects the executive's actual expertise and perspective, and whether the executive stands behind it as their own thinking. Content that is reviewed, refined, and approved by the executive who is named as the author meets this standard.
The ethical line is crossed when content is published under an executive's name that does not reflect their views, overstates their expertise, or was never seen by the executive before publication. That is not ghostwriting. That is misrepresentation.
AI-assisted content production operates under the same ethical standard. The executive provides the thinking, the AI drafts the content, and the executive reviews and approves before publication. The human judgment and expertise belong to the executive. The production assistance belongs to the tool. This is the human-in-the-loop model that governs responsible AI-assisted content production at the executive level.