“The author is not dying a second time. The author is splitting into two distinct figures with increasingly divergent social functions. On the one side, the Administrative Author: the person who holds the institutional position, the copyright, the reputational stake, the liability, without necessarily having performed the cognitive act that once gave those holdings their justification. On the other, something we do not yet have a fully adequate name for: the thinker who earns authorial aura precisely by demonstrating, in formats that cannot be faked or delegated, the capacity to engage with a problem frictively, in real time, at genuine intellectual cost.”
This from Anchit Sathi’s “AI and the Crisis of the Author”, a meditation on copyright law, ‘cognitive friction’, Barthes' call for the death of the author, Amazon’s meeting culture, and much else besides. I read it this morning and found it (usefully) troubling. Going onto the TLS website to provide a link I find this note: “We have removed this essay. AI was used in its preparation. The TLS editorial guidelines prohibit the use of AI in the writing and editing process. The author states that he was unaware of the policy.”