Stephen Downes

I like this discussion, and it raises a central point about meaning, text and authorship. Alex Danco contrasts two authors, Roland Barthes, who in The death of the author argued "that we should no longer assign a text's meaning as coming from the author. Text's meaning comes from text, and its relation to other text," and Michel Foucault, who argued in What is an author? that "there is nonetheless an emergent quality called 'authorship', which we create and employ socially as a way to categorize the text, assign meta-significance to it, or even to regulate it or police it." So, writes Danco, "LLMs, therefore, should be a total and complete triumph for Barthes," but that feels wrong, as we still need to "classify, compress, and critique the text; whether a person wrote it or not." In my view, the text plays a small role in meaning; far more important is how the reader comprehends the text (so, yes, the same text can have different meanings for different readers). The role of authorship, in my view, intersects with how the reader comprehends the text. Knowing the author allows the reader to recognize familiar ideas and concepts from characteristic turns of phrase. AI writing doesn't offer the same affordance, and so feels hollow and less meaningful to the reader.