CONCEPT
Agency and Authorship (Crawford)
Crawford's distinction between authoring a work and directing its construction — two forms of agency that produce categorically different experiences and categorically different practitioners.
Agency and authorship, in Crawford's philosophical vocabulary, names the distinction between being the cause of effects in the world through one's own skilled execution and being the specifier of outcomes whose execution is performed by systems one neither fully understands nor directly controls. The mechanic who repairs an engine and the director who orchestrates a film both exercise agency, but the forms are categorically different. The mechanic authors the repair: her hands, her judgment, her sensory engagement at every stage determined the outcome. The director specifies a vision that others embody. Both are legitimate. But the experiential quality and cognitive yield of the two forms of agency differ in ways that matter profoundly for what kind of practitioner each produces.
In The You On AI Field Guide
AI-mediated production transforms the practitioner from author to director. The engineer who describes a system to an AI and receives an implementation has exercised direction, not authorship. She specified the desired behavior. She evaluated the output. She made architectural decisions