“The Language of the Digital Air”

AI-Generated Literature and the Performance of Authorship

Bibliographic Data

ID20249366
AuthorsSilvana Colella (0000-0001-7539-9309, University of Macerata, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume14
Issue8
Pages164
Publication date2025-08-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h14080164
OpenAlexW4413121357
LanguageEN
References cited23

The release of ChatGPT and similar applications in 2022 prompted wide-ranging discussions concerning the impact of AI technologies on writing, creativity, and authorship. This article explores the question of artificial writing, taking into consideration both critical theories and creative experiments. In the first section, I review current scholarly discussions about authorship in the age of generative AI. In the second and third sections, I turn to experiments in literary co-creation that combine the affordances of technology with the human art of prompting and editing or curating. My argument has three prongs: (1) experiments that frame artificial writing as literature (memoir, poetry, autobiography, fiction) are accompanied by enlarged paratexts, which merit more attention than they have hitherto received; (2) paratexts provide salient clues on the process of co-creation, the reconfiguration of authorship, and the production of value; and (3) in the folds of paratextual explanations, one can detect the profile of the author as clever prompter, navigating a new terrain by relying at times on the certainties of conventional authorship. My analyses show that while AI-generated literature is a novel phenomenon worthy of closer scrutiny, the novelty tends to be cloaked in a familiar garb

Linguistics · Natural language processing · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Law, AI, and Intellectual Property · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy

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