Emerging models of AI ‘authorship' in popular discourse
Sara Bimo · 2024
Authorship, through its associations with authority and ownership, and its role in the determination of meaning, is tied inextricably to questions of power (for example, Barthes 1977 ; Foucault 1991[1984]). This chapter argues that the attribution of a particular model of authorship to General Purpose AI (GPAI) systems is not just a useful rhetoric for making sense of their textual output but is implicitly a value judgment of the authority and legitimacy of these technologies. Through a broad overview of trends in popular press reporting, this chapter suggests that emergent constructions of GPAI authorship can be broadly divided into three paradigms: as akin to the Romantic model of the singular ‘genius author’ ( Eagleton 2011 ); as a form of collaborative authorship (Manovich 2002); or as ‘authorless’. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the adoption of these authorship models for GPAI systems is inherently political, as it leads to a validation of their mechanisms of knowledge production and vests these technologies with particular kinds of authority and claims to truth. In this way, discourses surrounding AI authorship must be understood as paratexts that play a role in determining the meaning of GPAI output.