CONCEPT

Diffusion of Authorship

The specific consequence of AI collaboration that Berger's framework makes visible: when the trace of making is distributed across training data, model, and user, responsibility is distributed with it — and distributed responsibility, in practice, tends to become no responsibility at all.

The handmade artifact identifies its maker. The mass-produced object identifies its manufacturer. The AI-generated artifact identifies no one in particular. It carries the traces of millions of uncredited contributors whose work entered the training data, the engineers who built the model, the corporation that deployed it, and the user who wrote the prompt. No single participant made it; they all made it; the 'collaboration' made it. This diffusion looks like shared credit. In practice it functions as shared evasion — because the structures of accountability are designed to locate responsibility in specific agents, and when the agency is distributed across actors of incommensurable kinds, the location fails.

In The You On AI Field Guide

You On AI describes this diffusion honestly. 'Neither of us owns that insight,' the author writes of a moment of productive collaboration with Claude. 'The collaboration does.' The honesty is admirable, and the description of the

In The You On AI Field Guide

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