Emily Eakin in the New York Times:
The A.I. revolution was still more than 50 years off when Michel Foucault published his lecture “What Is an Author?” in 1969. But he seemed to sense it coming. “We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author,” he wrote. In such a world, writing “would unfold in a pervasive anonymity.”
Foucault was evidently excited by the idea. For him, language was not a neutral tool that we use to communicate or represent the world but something more sinister: the means through which power shapes how we think and act, and even what we can know. What he called the “author-function” was a legal ruse serving a strategic political purpose. It was a device for social control, a way of stanching the free flow of meaning, of tracing language back to a particular human being — “the author” — who could then be held accountable, even punished, for dangerous or objectionable ideas.
Now, of course, with the spread of generative A.I., language without an author is everywhere. But this new era of authorless discourse is hardly proving to be the liberation for people that Foucault fantasized about.
More here.
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