AI Signals The Death Of The Author: The meaning of a piece of writing does not depend on the identity of the author, even if the author is not human (David J. Gunkel, June 4, 2025, Noema)
I hold a different view. LLMs may well signal the end of the author, but this isn’t a loss to be lamented. In fact, these machines can be liberating: They free both writers and readers from the authoritarian control and influence of this thing we call the “author.”
If you were to ask someone what an author is, they would most probably answer that it is someone who writes a book or some other text and is therefore responsible for what it says. They could reel off the names of people we identify as such: William Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, maybe even this guy David Gunkel. But this understanding of an author is not some kind of universal truth that has existed from the beginning of time. Rather, it is a modern conception. The “author” as we now know it comes from somewhere in the not-so-distant past; it has a history.
The French literary critic Roland Barthes, in his 1967 essay “The Death of The Author,” traced the roots of this now-commonplace idea to the modern period in Europe, beginning around the mid-16th century. Before then, people did of course write texts — but the idea of vesting responsibility and authority in a singular person was not common practice. In fact, many of the great and influential works of literature — the folklore, myth and religious scripture that we still read today — have circulated in human culture without needing or assigning them to an author.