Who Wrote This?
Word count: 1901
Avg Read time: 14 min 38 sec (Apologies)
Today’s paltry words are the offspring of a conversation between two of my esteemed colleagues: Dr Byers and Mr O’Reilly. Your Director hovered at the edges, silently interloculating as these two Titans waded into some deep waters. Let me furnish you with the gist: Dr Byers was recounting how some students had been nigh on overcome with excitement about sharing with him a book they had written. Upon further investigations of the fairly straightforward kind, supported by the in-depth knowledge that Dr Byers has of his students’ writing styles, it soon became clear that the book had been written by one of those chatbots we hear about with ever-increasing frequency.
The students themselves were very happy to be open about the AI involvement, to the point of celebrating it. What was interesting, or disturbing, was that they were insistent that they were the authors of the book, because they had been the ones responsible for giving the chatbot the prompts. This led to a rather fascinating discussion from which, as I say, I derived both today’s theme (as well as a useful excuse not to mark Year 9 essays): what does authorship mean in an age where one can now generate a novella with less effort than boiling an egg, where machines can write for us? Or, depending on your view, instead of us?
The very concept of the author as a singular, important identity in Western culture is, like all ideas, something of an invention. This particular one solidified sometime around the eighteenth century. People were writing before then, obvs, but their sense of identity as an author, and their relationship to their texts, was different. For instance, before William Caxton introduced mass printing to England around 1466, who the author was didn’t really matter. Many medieval stories and romances, Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, were anonymous, and readers didn’t know or care about the writer. The meaning of a story was what mattered, and that was entirely separate from who happened to write it.
The idea of the author as the ‘true source’ of meaning continued to develop during the eighteenth century in the period known, however mistakenly, as the Industrial Revolution. In those heady days of steam engines and urbanisation, writing became property, and therefore something that could be sold. It became possible to have a career as an author without a patron, making a living by selling what you wrote. As ‘ownership’ of words became important for income, the importance of who owned those words grew. As with many things, clarity is often gleaned by following the money.
The Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also had a hand in shaping our current notion of what makes an author. This loose collection of artists, in their equally loose-fitting white blouses, who, when they weren’t flouncing about Europe and dying young, championed the idea of the writer as a ‘genius’. By which they didn’t just mean very intelligent. A genius, in their view, was a conduit between transcendent powers and the human world, someone who could tap into something deep and ineffable, then turn it into poetry for example. This focus on creative power made it increasingly important to distinguish those who possessed this gift from those who didn’t.
Another Romantic inheritance is the idea that an author must be original. But this, by nature, is a tricky idea. Some have even cast doubt on whether true originality is possible at all. Just as an artist is limited by a set range of colours, any supposedly ‘original’ idea is shaped by the words available, and words, of course, come pre-loaded with meanings, echoes, histories. In this sense, language shapes authors just as much as authors shape language.
On top of this, writers operate within genres, patterns of expectation. Even rebellion, as any teacher knows, and every student does not, follows a script. So perhaps the ‘author’ is already something of a fiction, not a solitary genius beaming down originality from the mountaintop, but a figure caught up in systems of language, convention, and cultural echoes. Echoes…echoes…
Which brings us to the theorists who threw the author off the mountaintop altogether.
In 1967, Roland Barthes declared the Death of the Author. What he meant, rather dramatically, was that a literary work doesn’t contain a hidden, singular meaning planted by a genius writer, waiting for clever readers to decode it. Instead, meaning emerges from the interaction between reader and text. The author’s intentions are not the final word, in fact, they’re not always all that relevant. The meaning of a work lies not in its origin, but in its destination: in you, the reader.
This wasn’t a cynical move, but a liberating one. Readers were no longer asked to be detectives, sniffing out clues to authorial intent. They were invited to be co-creators, to interpret, to question, to find fresh meanings. Understanding a text became an active, plural, participatory affair. We lost the all-powerful Author, yes, but we gained something more democratic in return.
But the story doesn’t end there. French historian-philosopher Michel Foucault, never one to let a radical idea go unproblematised, asked a follow-up question: if the author is dead, why are we all still talking about them?
Foucault introduced the concept of the author-function, the idea that ‘the author’ persists not as a person necessarily, but as a systemic role. The name ‘Emily Brontë’ or ‘Stephen King’ signals not just a person but a particular genre, tone, or tradition. The label helps us organise knowledge, assign value, manage expectations. When someone announces a “new Shakespeare poem” has been discovered, it generates headlines precisely because of the author attached. ‘Aphra Behn’s style’, ‘Beckett’s philosophy’, ‘Marxism’ these are more than biographical tags, they’re actually frameworks by which we glean meaning.
In none of these cases is the actual person necessarily the final authority. But the name continues to function socially, culturally, and economically.
Nevertheless, the author’s intention is still endlessly referred to, sometimes even to discount perfectly convincing and interesting readings. Many people, including most of my students, want an authority to explain a text and provide a final answer. This desire for a definitive meaning links the word ‘author‘ with ‘authority’. This wish is particularly heightened in literature, I’d argue, precisely because literature stimulates an unlimited proliferation of meanings. This idea, taken seriously, can feel quite threatening. If thinking about literature makes us think about the world, and there are no right answers about literature, are there any right answers anywhere? (Answer: No, unless someone is trying to sell you something).
The very cult of the writer as genius, which rose alongside copyright law and the printing press, meant the author became not just someone who wrote, but someone who owned what they wrote. From Romantic poets to literary prizewinners to academic citation indexes, we have turned authorship into a currency.
And yet, the older root of the word author suggests something richer. It comes from the Latin auctor, derived from augere, to increase, to originate, to promote growth. An author was one who gave rise to something: a creator, yes, but also a source, a cause, an augmenter of meaning and understanding. To be an author was not simply to produce language but to initiate something in the world which hadn’t been there before.
That’s precisely what today’s generative AI tools cannot do. They recombine existing patterns. They mimic tone. They simulate coherence. But they do not originate. They cannot surprise in the way humans do, by genuinely exceeding their inputs, by pushing against expectation, by revealing something new about the world or about ourselves. Their knowledge is statistical, not experiential. Their outputs are expressions without experience.
And yet we seem willing to let the simulacrum stand in for the real thing. Students speak of ‘writing‘ a book when all they’ve done is prompt it. People publish machine-generated poems with their names on the cover. AI-generated articles slip quietly into the stream of content, rarely announced, rarely questioned. And why not? The sentences are smooth. The grammar is sound. The machine writes faster, and doesn’t sulk.
It’s ironic, really. For decades, literary theorists told us to stop caring who the author was. But now, with the rise of generative AI, we’ve gone further. We may have reached the point where we’ve stopped caring whether there was an author at all.
But even in our postmodern moment, we remain curiously obsessed with the question of origins. Consider the centuries-old controversy about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Despite no compelling evidence, a lively industry persists, attributing the works to others. Why? Because the plays seem too rich, too human, too wise to have come from a single grammar-school-educated glover’s son. Surely, we think, something that extraordinary must have had an extraordinary source.
It’s a strange paradox. On the one hand, we say it doesn’t matter who wrote a work because meaning lies in the reader or the cultural moment. On the other foot, we refuse to believe that anonymous or ordinary people can produce extraordinary things. Perhaps we need our authors to be both invisible and mythic, to vanish from the page but loom over the tradition.
But now, with AI, we risk something even more radical: writing without writers, language without voice, style without soul. In the AI Library, there is no intention behind the words, no risk, no responsibility. No one has stood behind the sentence. And without that human presence; the person who augments, originates, authors, perhaps something vital is lost.
And what of the reader? Barthes envisioned them triumphant, newly empowered to interpret texts. But in practice, we are not reading more wisely; we are often reading less. Or rather, we are glancing, skimming, scrolling. The flood of frictionless, indistinguishable content overwhelms attention. If no one reads what is written, or generated, what becomes of meaning? Did the death of the author paradoxically precipitate the death of the reader too in some bizarre Holmes and Moriarty waterfall dive? (Before Holmes was resurrected by popular demand obvs).
We find ourselves in a peculiar cultural moment. Authorship is being outsourced. Reading is being replaced by glancing. Writing is becoming less about expressing something true and more about managing appearance, optimising SEO, performing authority, fine-tuning the prompt. The old relationship between writer and reader, that delicate, improbable thread connecting minds across time and space, begins to fray.
So what should schools aim to do? Ban the bots? Pretend it’s still 2015? Or do we instead teach students to become real authors, not just in the narrow sense of producing words, but in the deeper sense of taking ownership, of augmenting the world, of saying something true and necessary and theirs?
Perhaps we should return to the older meaning of auctor, not the one who controls or owns, but the one who originates, initiates, increases. To be an author is not to string together grammatically correct sentences. It is to risk something of oneself in the act of expression. To say something that matters, and if possible, to mean it. And maybe to leave a trace. To say: this was me.
And yes, for what it’s worth, I wrote this all by myself.
I think.
Until next time, Happy Reading/Authoring
TPQ #3 If no one reads what you write, did you really write it?
(Thorniness level out of 10? 0.7)