CONCEPT
Editorial Invisibility
The professional convention—editors' names absent from title pages—that concealed substantial contributions and worked ethically only when editing remained responsive rather than initiatory; AI collaboration exposes as ontological rather than conventional.
Editorial invisibility is the longstanding literary convention by which editors' contributions to published texts remain unacknowledged on title pages and visible only in brief acknowledgments, if at all. The convention served practical and ethical functions: it preserved the author's sole association with the work in public perception, protected the editorial relationship's confidentiality, and maintained the fiction that texts emerge from individual authorial consciousness. The invisibility was conventional rather than ontological—the editor's contributions were hidden by professional norms, not by the nature of the collaboration itself. The author and editor both knew what the editor had done; the contributions were recorded in editorial correspondence, tracked manuscript changes, and institutional memory. The convention worked ethically because it rested on a shared understanding of roles: the author initiated, the editor refined. The editor's contribution, however extensive, was responsive—improving what the author had written rather than writing in the author's place. This responsiveness justified the invisibility: the work remained the author's work because the author had made the generative choices and