https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1si1.024
Narrating the Constructed Self: AI Authorship and Posthuman Identity in The Safe Zone
SANDEEP S S
Research Scholar, Department of English
Vels Institute of Science, Technology and Advanced Studies, Chennai
sandeepindia.ss@gmail.com
DR. R. DHARANI
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Vels Institute of Science, Technology and Advanced Studies, Chennai
dharani.sl@vistas.ac.in
Abstract: The Safe Zone (2022), known as the first short film written and edited by an AI, and created with the assistance of ChatGPT, imagines a near future shaped by artificial intelligence where survival is reduced to a single moral decision. The narrative centres on three siblings who must choose who among them can enter a protected zone, leaving the others behind. This intimate conflict unfolds within a system governed by algorithmic logic, where human values are placed under pressure. A reading through posthumanism allows an exploration of how authorship and identity are reconfigured when narrative emerges through human and machine interaction. Drawing on the ideas of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and N. Katherine Hayles, the discussion understands AI-generated narrative as a site where selfhood is constructed through language rather than expressed as consciousness. The absence of a singular authorial voice foregrounds a distributed mode of creativity shaped by prompts, outputs, and human intervention. Identity appears not as something stable or inherent but as something formed, negotiated, and performed within technological systems.
Keywords: AI Authorship, Posthumanism, Narrative Identity, Constructed Self
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