Hell Yeah Authorship

There is an anxiety, to put mildly, around authorship and AI: Who actually made this?

I think part of the problem is that we imagine making as one big action. But creative work was never that simple, like at all.

If we take authorship apart, we’ll see these layers:

Problem.
Framing.
Constraints.
Direction of search.
Selection.
Configuration and reassembly.
Responsibility.

AI can participate in any of these layers, so can another person - it used to be called teamwork. So can software, precedent, reference, a contractor, a camera, a render, or pure accident - the last one waaay more often that you would think.

If I deliberately break a problem into pieces, think through each piece, use different tools to explore them, reject things, keep others, recombine them, and finally take responsibility for what gets built or published - I have a hard time seeing that as anything other than authorship.

This is also why I’m suspicious of the instinct to protect “humanity” by protecting manual, or what’s perceived manual, production.

Humanity is a lot of things: curiosity, inconsistency, obsession, bad decisions, changing your mind, misunderstandings, taking risks, and occasionally making a complete mess of things.

AI gives us another tool with which to organize, or badly organize, the world.

So let’s don’t ask AI for the final answer, but break the thing apart. Decide what matters at every layer. Use the machine where it helps. Don’t agree, interfere with it. Reassemble the pieces. Change your mind. And own the result.

Hell yeah, that feels like authorship to me.