Rewriting Authorship: AI-Generated Literature and the Postmodern Death of the Author

Abstract

The sudden proliferation of artificial intelligence in literary production has radically disrupted the traditional notion of authorship, originality, and creative agency. In this paper, I will return to Roland Barthes's classic essay “The Death of the Author” to argue that AI-produced literature represents the most tangible manifestation of poststructuralist theory to date. By engaging with the ideas of Michel Foucault’s “author-function,” Jacques Derrida’s theory of textual instability, and Walter Benjamin’s theory of mechanical reproduction, I will argue that AI does not merely kill the author but rather distributes authorship along algorithmic, institutional, and interpretive lines. By comparing and contrasting the poetics of Romanticism with AI-produced literature, I will show that artificial intelligence reconfigures authorship from a singular origin to a hybrid, procedural one. In doing so, AI represents not the “death of the author” but rather the “birth of algorithmic authorship.”