Geoff Shullenberger at the Hedgehog Review:
The line of thinking pursued by Barthes goes back to Plato’s Phaedrus, where writing is understood—not unlike chatbots today—as a technological prosthesis separate from the human person that produces an alienated, threatening simulacrum of discourse. In this sense, writing already forced the questioning of human essence more recently attributed to AI text generation. This questioning was at the center of the major lines of poststructuralist thought. Jacques Derrida enlisted the subversive power of writing identified by Plato in his project of “grammatology,” which sought to decenter logos, presence, authenticity, and other hallmarks of the human. For his part, Michel Foucault followed up on Barthes’s polemic with his “What Is an Author?” which concludes by heralding “the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?” This prophecy echoes Foucault’s earlier proclamation, in his 1966 book The Order of Things, that “man [will] be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”
more here.
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