If the author as the principal figure of literary authority and accountability came into existence at a particular time and place, there could conceivably also be a point at which it ceased to fulfill this role. That is what Barthes signaled in his now-famous essay. The “death of the author” does not mean the end of the life of any particular individual or even the end of human writing, but the termination and closure of the author as the authorizing agent of what is said in and by writing. Though Barthes never experienced an LLM, his essay nevertheless accurately anticipated our current situation. LLMs produce written content without a living voice to animate and authorize their words. Text produced by LLMs is literally unauthorized — a point emphasized by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which recently upheld a decision denying authorship to AI.
Criticism of tools like ChatGPT tends to follow on from this. They have been described as “stochastic parrots” for the way they simply mimic human speech or repeat word patterns without understanding meaning. The ways in which they more generally disrupt the standard understanding of authorship, authority and the means and meaning of writing have clearly disturbed a great many people. But the story of how “the author” came into being shows us that the critics miss a key point: The authority for writing has always been a socially constructed artifice. The author is not a natural phenomenon. It was an idea that we invented to help us make sense of writing.
After the “death of the author,” therefore, everything gets turned around. Specifically, the meaning of a piece of writing is not something that can be guaranteed a priori by the authentic character or voice of the person who is said to have written it. Instead, meaning transpires in and from the experience of reading. It is through that process that readers discover (or better, “fabricate”) what they assume the author had wanted to say.
This flipping of the script on literary theory alters the location of meaning-making in ways that overturn our standard operating presumptions.Previously, it had lain with the author who, it was assumed, had “something to say”; now, it is with the reader. When we read “Hamlet,” we are not able to access Shakespeare’s true intentions for writing it, so we find meaning by interpreting it (and then we project our interpretations back onto Shakespeare). In the process of our doing so, the authority that had been vested in the author is not just questioned, but overthrown.“Text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation,” wrote Barthes, “but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader. … A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” The death of the author, in other words, is the birth of the critical reader.
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All this throws up something that has been missed in the frenzy over the technological significance of LLMs: They are philosophically significant. What we now have are things that write without speaking, a proliferation of texts that do not have, nor are beholden to, the authoritative voice of an author, and statements whose truth cannot be anchored in and assured by a prior intention to say something.
From one perspective — a perspective that remains bound to the usual ways of thinking — this can only be seen as a threat and crisis, for it challenges our very understanding of what writing is, the state of literature and the meaning of truth or the means of speaking the truth. But from another, it is an opportunity to think beyond the limitations of Western metaphysics and its hegemony.
…Instead of being (mis)understood as signs of the apocalypse or the end of writing, LLMs reveal the terminal limits of the author function, participate in a deconstruction of its organizing principles, and open the opportunity to think and write differently.
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The LLM form of artificial intelligence is disturbing and disruptive, but not because it is a deviation or exception to that condition; instead, it exposes how it was always a fiction.
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How does Cohn suggest we write about animals? First, through “lyrical description,” which helps “reframe our understanding of belonging in a time of exigency.” Novelists may be catching up to what poets have long known: that lyric, as a less anthropocentric mode, might hold capacities that traditional narration lacks. Lyric, with its vividness, concreteness, and immanence, dodges the usual pitfalls of writing about animals and gets us out of the unfortunate maze of individualism. Cohn’s emphasis on lyric made me wonder why the novel, as opposed to the lyric poem, forms her main case study. After all, poets have made good-faith attempts to depict animals in all their animality, without turning them into mere props for human experience. Life of Pi may be more popular than the animal poems of Ted Hughes, Sharon Olds, and D. H. Lawrence, yet lyric poets like them have long known how to pay attention to nonhuman forms of life and modes of perception.
I teach a course called “How to Think About Animals,” in which we read T.H. Huxley’s classic paper “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata and Its History,” published in the journal Nature in 1874. Huxley (1825–1895), nicknamed Darwin’s Bulldog for his fierce defense of Natural Selection against the counter-tide of Victorian sentiment, recounts sympathetically how one of the greatest scientists of the seventeenth century, René Descartes (1596–1650), could have come to the unfortunate conclusion that animals are nothing more than unconscious machines.
Anthropomorphism also needs to be distinguished from anthropocentrism. In its most general sense, anthropocentrism refers to a bias that leads us to consider our own species as the center of the universe. It’s the tendency to think that, given that we are the most important thing from our perspective, we must be the most important thing in general.