#Note: I don't actually like using Death of the Author much in literary analysis

[flightfoot]

ChatGPT produced material embodies the concept of "Death of the Author" in its purest form

I've heard "Death of the Author" invoked many times throughout my years, but I had never actually read the essay that created the term and laid out how the concept worked before. I did so recently, as well as an analysis of that essay, which I will also reference because Roland Barthes original essay (well, translated essay, the original is in French) on "The Death of the Author" is an impenetrable mass of purple prose which can be very hard to follow, despite the essay's short word count of just over 2000 words.

If you wish to read it for yourself, here's a link to a pdf of the Death of the Author essay.

Basically the idea is that authors aren't really creators at all, but instead merely regurgitate and string together already existing writing, that "scriptor" would be a better term in fact.

The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.

and as the essay puts it later on:

We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the AuthorGod), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original

Or if you want to read something a little clearer, I like how this essay on filmslie puts it:

The use of the word “quotations” expresses the idea that a text cannot really be “created” or “original”—it is always made up of an arrangement of preexisting “quotations” or ideas. Therefore, the “author” is not really an author, but rather a “scriptor” who simply puts together preexisting texts.

And as it puts it later on:

The death of the Author is the inability to create, produce, or discover any text or idea. The author is a “scriptor” who simply collects preexisting quotations. He is not able to create or decide the meaning of his work.  The task of meaning falls “in the destination”—the reader.

As such, the author's actual presence as a person is not required, as the speech they utter, or rather the words they write, exist independently of a person to actually write them. From the Death of the Author essay:

Finally, outside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are being superseded), linguistics has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I

Meaning is derived not from what the author intended, as their existence is unneeded, but instead from whatever meaning the reader chooses to impose on what they read.

Doesn't this fit well with what ChatGPT and other AI "writers" do? There is no question after all that they merely copy and string together writing that already exists, creating a "tissue of citations", as Barthe puts it. There is no particular "author" of a work in this case, but merely the tool that strung them together, a "void process" that does not need a mind behind it. The meaning of a piece of writing that ChatGPT produces doesn't lie in anything that it intends, as it has no meaningful intentions to begin with, but is instead given to it by what the reader interprets from it.

ChatGPT and other AI like it make a reality what "The Death of the Author" posits that all writers do. When looking to apply the concept of Death of the Author to a piece of literature, simply pretend for a moment that instead of a human mind behind it, an AI created the work instead, and analyze the work's meaning accordingly.