“The Language of the Digital Air”: AI-Generated Literature and the Performance of Authorship

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.