CONCEPT
Authorship as Guarantee
The reconception of authorship for the AI age: the author is not the maker but the guarantor — the person who takes responsibility for the work, stands behind its claims, and holds the submedial space of depth the machine cannot provide.
AI destabilizes authorship more thoroughly than any previous technology, because it intervenes not at the level of reproduction or distribution but at the level of generation. The printing press reproduced the author's words. The camera reproduced the world the photographer framed. The recording captured the musician's performance. In each case, the human was the source and the technology was the means of transmission. AI reverses this relationship: the machine generates; the human selects, directs, evaluates — but does not, in the traditional sense, make. Groys's framework suggests three possible resolutions, corresponding to different understandings of what authorship is for.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The first resolution reconceives the author as guarantor. The author is not the person who made the work but the person who takes responsibility for it — who stands behind its claims, accepts accountability for its errors, and guarantees its quality with her