Augustine and the Posthuman Writer: Toward an Ambiguous Authorship in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract This article explores emerging hybrid ontologies of the posthuman in the context of generative AI technologies and their impact on writing practices. We should regard arguments mobilizing fear of AI-assisted or -generated writing as based on misguided anxieties about the potentials of human creative acts and man/machine hybrid creations (what this article refers to as a model of “weak authorship”). A reading of St. Augustine’s Confessions, a key work in the Judeo-Christian tradition, shows how an early Christian humanist text can give us a model for understanding paternalist structures that place human authorship and human creators within a hierarchy of creation, where the transcendental and divine is identified as the highest source of creation, and where the “human creator” must seek legitimation and authorization from that higher power to create in the first place. The article explores creativity through the concept of ambiguity, speculating on the extent to which AI and human authorship might be combined and to what extent such hybrid forms might impact our understanding of human creativity. As generative technologies continue to be integrated into our lifeworld, we should develop a strong account of authorship that embraces the concept of ambiguity as a means of orienting ourselves toward a nondualist ontology of becoming.