Author and Scribe: Authoring and Authorizing With and Without Generative AI

Technologies are designed to work and thereby challenge established divisions of labor. If the industrial loom led to a reorganization of manual labor, generative AI is impacting the division of cognitive labor. If that labor is defined as the composition or production of texts, it is quite evident that machines can do it. In an age where ChatGPT and related tools can do this very well, it becomes questionable why humans should not just leave to ghostwriters, scribes, or automatic text generators the work of manufacturing textual artefacts. Human authorship does then consist not in producing the text but in prompting and authorizing it. If, however, the division of cognitive labor concerns the practice of writing, one gets a very different picture: Thinking and writing coincide as one moves from awkward beginnings on a blank page to the final word of a published essay. If practicing the art of writing has cognitive or social value for cultivating the self, such virtues of practice are the best arguments for doing the writing oneself.—This reflection shows that technical developments do not necessarily raise new questions but dramatize familiar philosophical problems such as the one of authorship. One of these problems concerns different conceptions of technology, one focused on artefacts, the other on processes; another problem concerns different conceptions of language, one focused on propositions, texts, and what texts say, the other on showing and the ways in which language itself propels and deflects our ways of thinking. And then there is the problem regarding the human subject that in the Western world is typically conceived as a self-creating genius, or that can also be viewed as embedded in a social and technical form of life, partaking in the world by way of participation, attunement, modulation, and self-cultivation—as might be the case for a Daoist calligrapher. Whether authorship should involve writing and not just the production of text depends finally on how one values the practice of writing.