<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # I've spent decades building systems where human... > I've spent decades building systems where human and machine authorship interleave deliberately, with provenance preserved at every step. Most of the nonsense about AI authorship comes from people who have never thought about authorship as an engineering problem. {{Authorship was never solely an effort of feeling; it was a chain of custody, an organization of thought, and an order of preference over what an idea can compromise, how it is communicated, and what must never be surrendered.}} [[reminders/Writing/Authorship Is a Chain of Custody and an Organization of Thought by Bryant McGill|∴]] {{Today's panic regarding AI authorship is new in its shrill hysteria, but the problem is older than the printing press. A machine does not threaten authorship; it exposes everyone who never understood the deeper methods of organizing thoughts before they are mechanically written down.}} [[reminders/Writing/A Machine Does Not Threaten Authorship by Bryant McGill|∴]] {{The fiercest critics of AI authorship are human writers who have never thought seriously about what authorship is; their objection is often not an argument, but an unexamined reflex.}} [[reminders/Writing/AI Authorship Critics Often Offer Reflex Instead of Argument by Bryant McGill|∴]] Once that reflex is automated, the confusion becomes institutional: a detector classifies the surface of a document and is then mistaken for an account of the causal history that produced it. Some overreactions to AI authorship are not literary criticism at all but possibly a specialized form of the [[articles/AI-Tech Doomerism and Anti-Science Panic|AI-doomer and technological panic]] I have examined elsewhere: the machine is treated as a contaminant before anyone has identified which act of authorship it supposedly displaced. **Source:** [[projects/The Argument in Miniature - How I Write Quotations, Paragraphs, and Reusable Prose|The Argument in Miniature: How I Write Quotations, Paragraphs, and Reusable Prose]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “I've spent decades building systems where human and machine authorship interleave deliberately, with provenance preserved at every step. Most of the nonsense about AI authorship comes from people who have never thought about authorship as an engineering problem. Authorship was never solely an effort of feeling; it was a chain of custody, an organization of thought, and an order of preference over what an idea can compromise, how it is communicated, and what must never be surrendered. ∴ Today's panic regarding AI authorship is new in its shrill hysteria, but the problem is older than the printing press. A machine does not threaten authorship; it exposes everyone who never understood the deeper methods of organizing thoughts before they are mechanically written down. ∴ The fiercest critics of AI authorship are human writers who have never thought seriously about what authorship is; their objection is often not an argument, but an unexamined reflex. ∴ Once that reflex is automated, the confusion becomes institutional: a detector classifies the surface of a document and is then mistaken for an account of the causal history that produced it. Some overreactions to AI authorship are not literary criticism at all but possibly a specialized form of the AI-doomer and technological panic I have examined elsewhere: the machine is treated as a contaminant before anyone has identified which act of authorship it supposedly displaced.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-ive-spent-decades-authorship-supposedly-displaced ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->