Will LLM's lead to the death of the author?

ChatGPT said:

The "death of the author" in the Barthesian sense was about severing the authority of authorial intent, making meaning a function of the reader’s engagement rather than the writer’s intent. LLMs complicate this further—not by shifting interpretation to the reader, but by dissolving the authorial figure altogether into statistical pastiche.

If anything, LLMs push us toward a death of the writer, not just the author. Whereas Barthes was dismantling the singularity of authorial meaning, LLMs automate the labor of writing itself, remixing prior texts into novel-seeming outputs. This isn't quite authorship; it's an emergent textuality without a subject.

But paradoxically, this might revive the question of authorship in a different way. If anyone can generate text, then the role of the author shifts from producing language to curating, selecting, and framing. Instead of the Romantic idea of the lone genius, we may see a return to something older—authorship as compilation, commentary, and arrangement, akin to medieval scribes or Renaissance commonplace books.

So rather than a simple death, it’s more of an uncanny reanimation. The author dissolves, but the need for authority, style, and discernment lingers—just in a different form.

You said:

Renaissance commonplace books

What does this mean?

ChatGPT said:

Renaissance commonplace books were personal notebooks where scholars, writers, and intellectuals collected excerpts from texts they found significant—quotes, ideas, proverbs, arguments, and reflections. These books were not about original composition in the modern sense but about curation and synthesis, assembling knowledge from multiple sources and reorganizing it in ways that made sense to the compiler.

This practice was deeply valued in Renaissance humanism, where authorship was often about arranging existing wisdom rather than producing entirely new material. Montaigne’s Essays, for instance, are filled with quotations, and Shakespeare likely drew from commonplace books in crafting his plays.

In the context of LLMs, this idea is relevant because generative AI shifts writing away from ex nihilo creation and back toward curation, framing, and commentary. The skill of the future writer may resemble that of the Renaissance scholar—knowing which texts to draw from, how to recombine them, and how to impose structure and meaning.

You said:

uncanny reanimation

What does this mean?

ChatGPT said:

By uncanny reanimation, I mean that LLMs don’t simply "kill" the author in a clean, decisive way. Instead, they create something eerie—text that feels authored but isn’t, a kind of spectral writing that lacks a singular, originating voice.

It’s uncanny because it unsettles our sense of authorship: the text seems familiar, yet it comes from nowhere, without a conscious intent behind it. And it’s reanimation because it doesn’t just erase the author—it stitches together fragments of past human writing into something new, much like a literary Frankenstein’s monster.

So rather than a simple death of the author, we get something stranger: a world where "authored" texts keep appearing, but the author as a distinct, individual creative force is less and less necessary.

You said:

knowing which texts to draw from, how to recombine them, and how to impose structure and meaning

As in Kant's critique of judgment?

ChatGPT said:

Yes, there’s a parallel with Kant’s Critique of Judgment, particularly in how Kant distinguishes determinative judgment (applying known concepts to particulars) from reflective judgment (where the particulars are given, but the concept or organizing principle must be found).

If LLMs function largely through determinative judgment—applying learned patterns to new prompts—then human engagement with AI-generated text may require a reflective mode of authorship. That is, instead of purely originating content, the human author selects, recombines, and imposes meaning on a vast field of generated possibilities.

This suggests that the role of the writer might shift toward aesthetic and conceptual judgment—not just creating, but discerning what deserves to be shaped, framed, or discarded. In this sense, the act of writing (or authoring) becomes more about curating and synthesizing than about direct production.