Tip-Off #209 - Authorship and the Ancient Debate
"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud." —after Émile Zola (1840-1902), moralist, leading naturalist writer.
The sudden rise of advanced AI that can mimic human writing has shaken things up. When machines can produce essays, poems, and code—often with startling fluency—we’re left wondering: Who’s the author here? And can we still call it ours?
Much of the unease comes from how easily the line between human and machine begins to blur. That makes it harder to know what counts as genuine creativity. Some argue that these language models aren’t truly creative at all—they remix what they’ve absorbed, drawing from vast archives of existing material.
There’s also growing concern that leaning too much on AI could dull our creative instincts. When it becomes hard to separate what people create from what computers generate, we risk losing touch with something essential.
But these anxieties aren’t entirely new. Technological worry follows a cyclical pattern. After the earliest hieroglyphs came oral culture, which gave way to writing—and with it, skepticism. Plato feared that writing would weaken memory and create only the appearance of wisdom. He said that in writing. In his dialogue Phaedrus, he recounts how the Egyptian god Theuth offers writing as a gift, but King Thamus sees it as a double-edged sword: a tool that might foster reliance rather than understanding. Plato thought of writing as a pharmakon—a cure that is also a poison.
Centuries later, Augustine echoed similar fears in his Confessions. Outsourcing memory to text, he warned, could compromise the integrity of thought. Today, these same concerns resurface around AI. Will it become a cognitive crutch, dulling attention and eroding understanding? The medium changes—from stylus to scroll, printing press to algorithm—but the worry remains stubbornly human: the copy overtakes the original; the tool replaces the skill.
Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher best known for developing the concept of deconstruction—and unfairly reduced to a campus demigod—reopened this question in Plato’s Pharmacy. He focused on pharmakon as a key to Plato’s ambivalence: not just a label for writing, but a sign of language’s double nature. Derrida used it to challenge the very idea of an “original” untouched by mediation. For him, meaning is never fixed but always deferred—what he called différance. Origins exist, but only as interpretations. In that light, AI-generated text may not threaten meaning so much as expose how meaning has always been made.
Cultural theorists of technoscience Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles take this further. Haraway’s cyborg and Hayles’ “technogenesis”—the co-evolution of humans and tools—challenge the idea of a clean boundary between human and machine. In this view, overstated though it can be, AI writing isn’t an aberration but an amplification of our long history of hybrid authorship.
Meanwhile, the human cost of our digital lives is increasingly clear. Lauren Oyler, a novelist and literary critic known for her sardonic wit, skewers the performance of identity online in her debut novel, Fake Accounts. There, self-curation hardens into emotional detachment. Elsewhere, she emphasizes the irreplaceability of human judgment in literary criticism—AI cannot replicate the nuanced, interpretive work that critics do.
Psychologist Sherry Turkle warns we’ve traded conversation for connection. Computer scientist Jaron Lanier laments the flattening of individual voice. Without tone, timing, or presence, empathy begins to slip away.
We now face a de-voicing crisis, where speech is drowned out by noise. In a world saturated with algorithmic output and curated selves, what does it mean to speak with one’s own voice—and to be heard?
What will make us stand out is not how hard we labor, but how much of ourselves shows up in the final product. A text matters when it moves us—when it speaks with conviction, surprises us with insight, or lingers in memory. Whether shaped by hand or algorithm, what counts is not the origin but the resonance.
As another critic has it, creativity is sparked by the “anxiety of influence.” One way or another, originality stands on the shoulders of giants. But we’re already a mix of dust and deity. That doesn’t mean kneeling at their feet.
Perhaps the point isn’t to draw a hard line between real and fake. The key is to stay engaged. As Émile Zola urged, the courage to “live out loud” makes the difference—speaking honestly and directly in a deceptive world.
Notes and reading
“…I am here to live out loud” - Commonly attributed to Émile Zola, though the exact source is unidentified. The quote is interpreted as reflective of his outspoken artistic and political stance.
Fake Accounts - Lauren Oyler (2021). A Washington Post Best Book of the Year. - See also, “A Sense of Agency: A Conversation with Lauren Oyler” - The Paris Review (April 3, 2024). Oyler is refreshingly uncurated. She’s a serious, welcome break. Laugh and cry.
A Cyborg Manifesto - Donna Haraway (1985); How We Became Posthumans - N. Katherine Hayles (1999). Alone Together - Sherry Turkle, (2011); You Are Not a Gadget - Jaron Lanier, (2010).
“Anxiety of Influence” - from literary critic Harold Bloom. Though Bloom wrote primarily about poetry, the concept resonates today with the pressures and inheritances of machine-generated creativity.
“Will AI Be Alive? What Lies Ahead and How to Face It Well” — an essay in three parts: seeing clearly, judging prudently, acting rightly — by Brian J. A. Boyd, published in The New Atlantis (Spring 2025). Boyd is a strategic consultant to the journal and a moral theologian at Loyola University New Orleans.
Note: Pope Francis used the concept of “integral ecology” to emphasize the profound interconnectedness of all things and how moral challenges, including AI, cannot be addressed in isolation. Prophecy is pastoral, not obsessed with the disjointed transmission of doctrines to be insistently imposed—genuinely pastoral because it involves care, listening, and moral courage. (after Evangelii Gaudium §231)
AI for Educators: Learning Strategies, Teacher Efficiencies, and a Vision for an Artificial Intelligence – Matt Miller (2023). Rather than fearing AI, teachers can harness it to reduce burnout, personalize learning, and boost student engagement. - Miller has spent more than a decade teaching about technology in public schools.
Uptaught - Ken Macrorie (1970). Dated but timely. Critiques the “formula-style” essay for forcing students to write mechanically instead of self-expressively—a worry newly relevant in the age of AI, where the challenge is not just to produce text, but to say something real. Macrorie was Emeritus Professor of English at Western Michigan University and author of Telling Writing (Fourth Edition) and a number of other books.
From Nick Cave, rock star and spiritual elegist (Substack The Red Hand Files):
“Nothing you create is ultimately your own, yet all of it is you. Your imagination, it seems to me, is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence, and is not intrinsic to you; rather, it is a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.”
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