Rob Horning, From work to text, and back again: ChatGPT and the (new) death of the author, Overland, 23 February 2023
When he declared the death of the author, in 1968, Roland Barthes was attacking the idea that our understanding of any particular text should be conditioned or constrained by the person who happened to write it or what they intended. A year later, Michel Foucault posed the question ‘What is an author?’ and concluded that it is not a person but rather a ‘function of discourse,’ a posited ‘principle of unity’ that forcibly harmonises and conceals the different voices speaking in a text.
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So perhaps we should be celebrating the development of large language models like ChatGPT, which seem to poised to make once radical-seeming post-structuralist speculation and make it appear as everyday common sense. Authors? Of course they’re dead, and lie on the scrapheap with switchboard operators and typesetters.
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Generative models extinguish the dream that Barthes’s essay articulates by fulfilling it. Their ‘tissue of signs’ seems less like revolution and more like the fear that AI will create a recursive postmodern nightmare world of perpetual sameness that we will all accept because we no longer remember otherwise or how to create an alternative.
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