AI Signals The Death Of The Author
Created: 2025-06-24
In response to any written document, like the one you are reading right now, it is reasonable to ask who wrote it and can therefore authorize its content. To resolve this, you will probably try to learn a bit about the author, for their identity can help determine the truthfulness of what is in the document.
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Created: 2025-06-24
Technically speaking, an algorithm wrote the text, but a human had to prompt the algorithm. So who or what is the author? Is it the algorithm, or the human, or a joint venture involving both? Why does it even matter?
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Created: 2025-06-24
LLMs may well signal the end of the author, but this isn’t a loss to be lamented. In fact, these machines can be liberating: They free both writers and readers from the authoritarian control and influence of this thing we call the “author.”
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Created: 2025-06-24
this understanding of an author is not some kind of universal truth that has existed from the beginning of time. Rather, it is a modern conception. The “author” as we now know it comes from somewhere in the not-so-distant past; it has a history.
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Created: 2025-06-24
Before then, people did of course write texts — but the idea of vesting responsibility and authority in a singular person was not common practice. In fact, many of the great and influential works of literature — the folklore, myth and religious scripture that we still read today — have circulated in human culture without needing or assigning them to an author.
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Created: 2025-06-24
the author became the responsible party in a new kind of property law: copyright. The idea of an author being the legitimate owner of a literary work was first introduced in London not out of some idealistic dedication to the concept of artistic integrity, but in response to an earlier technological disruption that permitted the free circulation and proliferation of textual documents: the printing press.
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Created: 2025-06-24
The idea of individual authorship — that one person would create an original work and have historical title to it — did not really become entrenched in the public mind until print superseded orality as the basis of cultural communication
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Created: 2025-06-24
Though Barthes never experienced an LLM, his essay nevertheless accurately anticipated our current situation. LLMs produce written content without a living voice to animate and authorize their words. Text produced by LLMs is literally unauthorized — a point emphasized by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which recently upheld a decision denying authorship to AI.
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Created: 2025-06-24
The authority for writing has always been a socially constructed artifice. The author is not a natural phenomenon. It was an idea that we invented to help us make sense of writing.
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Created: 2025-06-24
Words, therefore, do not exclusively come to have meaning by direct reference to things; words refer to other words. This is the meaning (or at least one of the meanings) of that famous statement associated with the notoriously difficult French theorist Jacques Derrida: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” or “There is nothing outside the text.”
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Created: 2025-06-24
LLMs are structuralist machines — they are practical actualizations of structural linguistic theory, where words have meaning not by reference to things but by referring and deferring to other words — and they thereby disrupt the standard operating presumptions of classical (Aristotelian) semiotics.