Reimagining Literary Authorship in the Age of Generative AI: Human Creativity, Machine Text, and the Politics of Literary Value

Abstract

This article reflects a second look at authorship in literary works in the context of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), when human creativity is increasingly intertwined with machine-produced text and literary value. It aims to explore the suitability of traditional notions of authorship in the context of direct engagement with the creation of texts by large language models, to identify the layers of literature-generating processes besides those of the conventional authorial roles of text generation, agency and intent, and to examine the ways in which the AI-mediated production can alter the cultural mechanisms that enable the assignment of literary value. Theoretically, the critical interpretive method is used, which integrates close textual analysis, post structural theories of authorship, sociology of literature fields and recent research on the literature created by artificial intelligence. It introduces current research on human and AI-created fiction and it investigates the institutional, ethic, and cultural discourses that categorize, assess, and attribute machine-generated texts. The analysis suggests that GenAI is not a replacement for the human author but extends the authorship to the prompt, the selection, the revision, the interpretation, the technological platform, and the institutional recognition. It suggests a model of “relational authorship” that is different from the standard idea of writers/creators having responsibility for the text they produce, and embraces a distributed model of creative agency. Its main application is to offer literary studies a framework for assessing AI-generated compositions without de-literarising the literary value either to human exceptionalism or to technological novelty.

Keywords: generative AI, literary authorship, artificial intelligence, creativity, literary values, digital humanities, machine-generated literature, posthumanism, literary field.

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/112-01

Publication date: October 30^th 2026