Authorship

1. Basic definition

Authorship refers to the state or fact of being the creator of a work, such as a text, artwork, idea, or invention.
Traditionally, it means the person (or people) who produce and take responsibility for a creative or intellectual work.

2. In academia

Authorship carries ethical and professional responsibility.
An author is accountable for:

• the accuracy of the work
• the integrity of the research
• giving proper credit to collaborators and sources

In multi-author projects, determining authorship order and contribution can be very important and sometimes debated.

3. In art and cultural theory

In contemporary art, philosophy, and literary studies, authorship is often seen as a more complex, shared, or unstable concept.

Think of Roland Barthes’ famous idea:

“The death of the author.”
He argued that once a text is created, its meaning doesn’t belong solely to the author – it emerges in the interaction between text and reader.

So in artistic or research contexts, authorship can mean:

• Collective creation (many people shaping a work)
• Distributed authorship (machines, AI, or algorithms contributing)
• Situated authorship (the author’s identity, context, or position shaping meaning)
  

4. In storytelling and research

Authorship could mean who shapes and frames a narrative – and how that process reflects identity, perception, or power.
It’s not just who writes the story, but who gets to tell it, whose voices are heard, and how meaning is co-created between the storyteller and the audience.

Last but not least:

A Plea for the Imagined: Authorship in the Age of AI

In a world increasingly shaped by algorithms, writing, word by word, day by day, slow and searching, feels almost like an act of resistance. Not because machines surpass us, but because they remind us how easily we forget the difference between imitation and imagination.

AI can predict language. It can simulate structure, tone, even emotions. But it cannot imagine. It cannot truly feel content. It does not pause, hesitate, or transform a memory into a poetic metaphor. It is not haunted at night by an idea that doesn’t fully make sense yet.
It cannot turn an inner conflict into a story that, over days or years, unfolds its own intuitive logic, through searching, evolving, growing, until the personal becomes something universally human.

Humans do not write to fill space; they write to shape space. To dive into questions, they have no answers to yet. Even to find questions they could never have guessed without puzzling with words for hours. Writing is not a process but a journey. Authorship requires presence. It demands subjective perception, conscious existence, an individual perspective on the world. And at its center is something no model can replicate: imagination – unpredictable, illogical, deeply personal.

AI produces content. A human work has edges, pauses, contradictions. Traces that tell of what it means to be alive. Authors create originality because they dream, doubt, grow, and know their time here is limited.