https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.077
Prompting the Author: Barthes, Foucault, and the Question of Authorship in AI-generated English Poetry
MOHAMMAD BILAL
Research Scholar
Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University, Uttar Pradesh
Abstract: The contemporary literary landscape has witnessed an unprecedented saturation of AI-generated creative writing, with digital tools increasingly producing poetry, fiction, and drama that imitate human aesthetic sensibilities. This growing wave of machine-authored writing challenges long-held ideas of creativity and originality. Critical debates have raised questions about who or what actually constitutes the ‘author’ in such texts: the machine, the programmer, or the user who gives the prompt.
The paper, through a critical analysis of select AI-generated English poetry, interrogates the shifting dynamics of authorship within the theoretical frameworks proposed by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Drawing on Barthes’ seminal notion of the “Death of the Author,” the study explores whether AI-created poems can be understood as texts free from human intention, where meaning resides purely in the reader’s interpretive act. At the same time, the research draws on Foucault’s concept of the “author-function” to ask whether authorship simply shifts to the prompter, the developer, or the platform that enables creation. The paper ultimately argues that AI does not abolish the author but rather redistributes and redefines authorship across human and technological networks, highlighting how digital poetics operate through a decentered, networked authorship that both affirms and challenges Barthesian and Foucauldian paradigms.
Keywords: AI-generated literature; authorship; death of the author; author-function; Indian English poetry
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