Open Discussion with David Gunkel at ZeMKI

In response to any written text—like the sentences you are reading right now—it is reasonable to ask who wrote it and can therefore explain and authorize what it says. This seemingly sensible inquiry is typically resolved by pointing to and naming the author. And it is the identity of this individual—who they are and where they come from—that often serves as a shortcut for determining the validity or truthfulness of written content. But when something is written or generated by a large language model, like ChatGPT, Claude, or Deepseek, who or what is the author? Is it the algorithm? Is it the human who prompted it? Or is it perhaps both? Counter to the recent crop of AI criticism, which bemoan the end of the human writer, I will argue that this disruption in literary authority is actually a good thing, precisely because it flips the script on everything we knew—or thought we knew—about writing and the author function.