Foucault, Authorship, and AI

Emily Eakin in the NY Times:

The A.I. revolution was still more than 50 years off when Michel Foucault published his lecture “What Is an Author?” in 1969. But he seemed to sense it coming. “We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author,” he wrote. In such a world, writing “would unfold in a pervasive anonymity.”

Foucault was evidently excited by the idea. For him, language was not a neutral tool that we use to communicate or represent the world but something more sinister: the means through which power shapes how we think and act, and even what we can know. What he called the “author-function” was a legal ruse serving a strategic political purpose. It was a device for social control, a way of stanching the free flow of meaning, of tracing language back to a particular human being — “the author” — who could then be held accountable, even punished, for dangerous or objectionable ideas.

Now, of course, with the spread of generative A.I., language without an author is everywhere. But this new era of authorless discourse is hardly proving to be the liberation for people that Foucault fantasized about. Instead, it is dominated by a handful of chatbots produced by secretive, billionaire-owned corporations and vulnerable to manipulation for political ends.

Still, Foucault would not have been entirely surprised. Power, in his view, was inescapable. This is his double-edged legacy to us: a vision of the world that in its concrete details seems eerily to anticipate our own but in which progress and freedom often turn out to be illusions, at the mercy of power.