Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Creative Writing: Reconfiguring Authorship as a Socio-Technical Communication Process
TL;DR
It is argued that AI does not eliminate the author but redistributes authorial agency across socio-technical assemblages in which writers, models, interfaces, publishers, platforms, critics and audiences participate in the production of legitimacy.
Abstract
This article examines artificial intelligence-assisted creative writing as a socio-technical communication process embedded in contemporary media ecosystems. Rather than treating generative AI exclusively as a literary innovation or as a philosophical challenge to romantic notions of authorship, the study situates AI writing within the interrelated domains of mediation, circulation, platform infrastructures, cultural industries and institutional validation. The article adopts a qualitative comparative case study design and analyzes four emblematic cases of human-AI textual production and reception: Pharmako-AI, Death of an Author, Sunspring and Dramatron. To address concerns regarding analytical precision, the research defines a transparent corpus composed of peer-reviewed scholarship, media coverage, public interviews, platform and industry documentation and the primary texts or scripts associated with each case. Five analytical dimensions are operationalized across the corpus: degree of human intervention, narrative coherence and depth, perceived originality, communicative reception and ethical-institutional tension. Drawing on Barthes’s and Foucault’s classic reflections on authorship and integrating platformization, mediatization, actor-network theory and cultural industries scholarship, the article argues that AI does not eliminate the author but redistributes authorial agency across socio-technical assemblages in which writers, models, interfaces, publishers, platforms, critics and audiences participate in the production of legitimacy. The findings indicate that authorship in AI-assisted writing is increasingly negotiated through communicative processes of framing, disclosure, circulation and evaluation rather than through textual origin alone. On this basis, the article proposes a framework of responsible co-authorship grounded in transparency, proportional attribution, editorial disclosure and the protection of cultural diversity. The study contributes to communication research by showing that AI writing is not only a matter of creativity but also a mediated process of symbolic production in which power, legitimacy and meaning are structured by digital infrastructures and institutional arrangements.