CONCEPT
Authorship as Direction
McGann's post-exposure redefinition of authorship: not solitary creation but the act of pointing a collaborative process toward a specific end, from a position of stakes and biographical specificity.
If authorship is not solitary creation — if every published text is the product of a collaborative process involving multiple agents — what does authorship actually consist of? McGann's framework, applied to AI-assisted writing, yields a specific answer: authorship consists of direction, evaluation, and stakes. Direction is the act of choosing what the collaboration is for, what questions it pursues, what argument it advances. Evaluation is the critical judgment that distinguishes between what the collaboration produces and what the text should contain. Stakes are the specific, mortal, biographical condition that makes the direction and evaluation consequential in a way that machine participation cannot replicate. These three elements are irreducible to the collaborator's contributions and constitute what the author provides that no other agent can supply.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework's first element is direction. The author is the person who decides what the text is about, who selects the driving questions, who provides the biographical material that gives the text its