Writing at a Distance: Notes on Authorship and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay provides an overview of notions of authorship in AI and natural language processing systems and discusses past and current debates about computers as literary authors. It suggests the concept of causal authorship to measure the types of distance between human and machine agents, acknowledging the anthropocentric bias of this idea. To balance this, the essay reflects on the notion of distributed authorship , which considers the network of actors involved in the creation of a text and has its own limitations. Both concepts are elements of a future theory of authorship in the age of machine learning.