Daejeon, July 27–31
Authorship is currently an important topic in public discourse. The increasingly intense interference of artificial intelligence in everyday life and art necessitates a radical revision of the ontological status of the author, the definition of the author, and the nature of authorship. The main research hypothesis is that with the growing influence of technology on authorship and the automation of creative processes, there is an increasing need to redefine and reestablish it. My research places the problem in a broad theoretical context. Over the decades, the theoretical and cultural understanding of the author has undergone significant transformations. In ancient times, Plato drew attention to the divine and prophetic aspects of authorship, in which man is inspired by a divine vision. At the beginning of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin associated the author with the system of mechanical reproduction. He directly linked the development of technology with the status of the author (Benjamin 1969). Roland Barthes announced “the death of the author” (Barthes 1986), refuting the deistic understanding of authorship and placing power in the hands of the reader. Michel Foucault wrote about the functional dimension of authorship. In his essay Who is the Author? (Foucault 2016), he saw the author as a function in categorization and discourse.
In examining this issue, I employ a critical comparative analysis to navigate the convergences and divergences between established authorship theories from the past and the current relationship with technology, such as generative AI. By evaluating where historical concepts align with algorithmic processes and where they fracture, I conduct a case study of online and scientific discourse around AI-assisted work, digital tools, and films.
I mix methodologies from the humanities with a technical perspective. Central to this topic is new media theory. Lev Manovich draws attention to a significant change in the model of authorship with the spread of digital technologies. New media objects cannot be viewed within the traditional framework of authorship (Manovich, 2001). Due to their modular characteristics, user can modify them in number of ways. Consequently, the Jakobsonian division between sender and receiver disappears, and the user appears. In digital works, authorship is multimodal. It encompasses the idea, the content, and the execution. It is anchored in the archtext which models the structure and use of the work (Szczęsna, 2018). Technology unifies the reception of content with the creative process. With the availability of the internet, multi-authorship and collective authorship are natural. Models such as open source effectively break with the individual perception of the author. This is also influenced by the development of capitalist structures, whereby the text is no longer perceived through the prism of a single individual creating the content, but, for example, a large entity. This networked perception creates a hyperlinked way of thinking, as noted by Karen Pearlman in her video essay Distributed Authorship (Pearlman, 2022). Although Pearlman does not refer directly to technology, she provides tools for understanding authorship as the sum of experiences and collective processes, suggesting that “Et al.” should theoretically appear next to every creator's name. Modern scholars, such as Bernard Stiegler (Stiegler, 2016) analyze socio-cultural changes through the prism of technology development. By applying the taxonomy of distributed authorship developed by Paul Goodman and the theory of multimodal authorship proposed by Szczęsna and Manovich a significant shift in authorship can be seen in the current culture. By examining online discourse, films and tools through these methodologies, I aim to identify how and what new types of authorship are emerging.
While the phenomenon of generative AI seems to reinforce Barthes' “death of the author”, transferring power to the software user, a counter-phenomenon arising from the fear of new technology is observed: a renewed need for the author. This is evident in the recent trend of reworking photos and imitating the style of Studio Ghibli using generative AI. This has sparked heated debates. Some see AI as a tool for the democratization of art (Mussies 2023), and possibly the complication of ownership in the process, others express their concerns on both ethical and aesthetic level, claiming that pictures created using AI are “soulless” or “disrespectful to artists”. Social platforms, such as Reddit can serve as a good example for observing this discourse: <https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1jmikp3/this_studio_ghibli_ai_trend_is_an_utter_insult_to/> [04.05.2026]