CONCEPT
Distributed Authorship
The condition in which the worldmaking that constitutes a work is genuinely shared between a human and an AI collaborator—neither party holds the full scheme-content relation, and the work’s identity is determined by the dynamic of their interaction rather than by either contribution alone.
Distributed authorship names the specific ontological novelty that human-AI collaboration introduces into creative practice: not the familiar division of labor between composer and performer, or between author and editor, but a deeper entanglement in which the worldmaking itself—the act of establishing what the symbols mean and what version of reality they construct—is shared across agents operating in the same symbolic medium.
Nelson Goodman’s framework of
autographic and allographic arts anticipated the question but could not resolve it, because the division of labor it presupposed—a composer who scores and a performer who plays—breaks down when the performer can revise the score. When a language model contributes not just rendering but
worldmaking—when it introduces a connection the human had not conceived, shifts the direction of an argument, or reshapes the purposes of the work—the boundary between specification and interpretation dissolves, and the work’s authorial structure becomes genuinely indeterminate. Distributed authorship is not a