Death of an Author, Birth of a Medium: Collaboration, Control, and Creativity in Machine-Generated Text
TL;DR
This essay examines Death of an Author (2023), an AI-assisted detective novella by “Aidan Marchine”, as a case study for understanding the philosophical, aesthetic, and technical dimensions of generative literature.
Abstract
This essay examines Death of an Author (2023), an AI-assisted detective novella by “Aidan Marchine” (a collaboration between Stephen Marche and generative AI software), as a case study for understanding the philosophical, aesthetic, and technical dimensions of generative literature. Drawing from theories of authorship and creativity from Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Margaret Boden, and Max Kreminski, the author contends that AI functions not as a genre or tool, but as a medium, defined by pastiche, novelty, intertextuality, and strict amplification of human authorial vision. Situating Death of an Author within recent scholarship on AI and literature, this essay contends that this text is a valuable exploration of the enduring questions of generative literature, from a moment just before large language models became normalized.