Jerome McGann — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Jerome McGann — On AI. 16 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Aesthetics of the Smooth
Byung-Chul Han's diagnosis — extended through Dissanayake's biological framework — of the cultural dominance of frictionless surfaces and the specific reason the smooth feels biologically wrong.
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.
Bibliographical Code of AI Text
The material signature of machine-generated prose — tonal consistency, structural regularity, the absence of textual grain — that communicates about origin independently of what the words claim.
Embodied Cognition
The research tradition — converging from neuroscience, philosophy, and robotics — that mind is not separable from body, and whose empirical maturity over four decades has made the computational theory of mind increasingly hard to defend.
Ground Projects
Williams's name for the deep commitments that give a life its character — not preferences, but the projects without which the agent would not recognize her life as her own. The units of identity the AI transition is reorganizing faster than…
Intentionality and Multiple Agents
McGann's argument that the question 'whose intention does the text express?' is not answerable in the simple form the conventional framework assumes — every published text reflects multiple intentions interacting within a social process.
Invisible Agents of Textual Production
The editors, compositors, publishers, and ghost writers whose decisions shape every published text and whose contributions the convention of single authorship renders systematically invisible.
Linguistic Code vs. Bibliographical Code
McGann's foundational distinction — the words of a text versus its material presentation — which together constitute meaning and which cannot be separated without loss.
The Ghost Writer Convention
The publishing industry's practice of contractually concealing the writers who produce texts published under other people's names — the most successful erasure in the history of modern authorship.
The Palimpsest (Manuscript Evidence)
The layered material record of a text's composition — crossed-out words, marginal insertions, revisions in different inks — that traditional manuscripts preserve and AI collaboration systematically bypasses.
The Romantic Ideology
McGann's 1983 diagnosis that literary criticism has uncritically adopted the Romantic poets' self-understanding — the myth of solitary genius — and mistaken it for an objective description of creation.
The Social Text
McGann's reconception of the published text as the negotiated product of multiple agents — author, editor, publisher, compositor, censor — rather than the expression of a single originating consciousness.
The Solitary Author Convention
The three-century-old practice of attributing published texts to a single originating consciousness — a compression so institutionally embedded it has ceased to register as a compression.
