AI can be an author
Barthes said the author is dead: meaning is made by the reader, not the writer. AI fits that idea almost too well. In one plain sense, it can be an author.
In 1967, the critic Roland Barthes wrote that the author is dead.
In 1967, the critic Roland Barthes wrote that the author is dead. He did not mean it literally. He meant that a text is not the pure voice of one mind. It is a weave of things written and said before. And the meaning of a text is made by the reader, not handed down by the writer.
AI fits this idea almost too well. It builds text out of patterns it has taken in from huge amounts of writing. It has no intention. It has no life story. It has no body.
So in one plain sense, AI can be an author. It arranges material into a form, and that form produces meaning in whoever reads it.
Artists have played with this before. Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery and called it art. The art was the choice to frame it, not the making of it.
In a plain sense, yes. It arranges material into a form that produces meaning,.
In 1967, the critic Roland Barthes wrote that the author is dead.
He meant that a text is not the pure voice of one mind.
It is a weave of things written and said before.
For a lot of professional work, this is enough. Brand copy. Content. Strategy decks. It does not really matter whether a person or a model arranged the words. The work either works or it does not.
So far, AI stands on solid ground. But there is a line it does not cross, and the rest of this series is about that line.
He meant that a text is not the pure voice of one mind.
In a plain sense, yes. It arranges material into a form that produces meaning, and for much professional work that is enough.
Barthes said the author is dead: meaning is made by the reader, not the writer. AI fits that idea almost too well. In one plain sense, it can be an author.
This is the short version. Read the full-length essay, “The Artist’s Body”.
This issue is part of Everybody's Smart, a newsletter on taste, judgment, AI, culture, cognition, and the future of professional work. New issues every 2 to 3 weeks, free on LinkedIn.
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