Jake Dahl

I think the AI writing debate is asking the wrong question. The question isn’t: Did AI contribute any words or ideas? The better question is: Who is the author? And that requires us to say what authorship actually is. I’d define it around three things: intent, judgment, and responsibility. The author has an intent for the work. The author exercises judgment over what belongs and what doesn’t. And the author takes responsibility for the finished thing. Notice what’s missing. Nowhere in that definition does every idea or every word have to originate in isolation inside one person’s head. Writers have never worked that way. When I get stuck on a story or essay. I talk it through with my wife. She suggests something I hadn’t considered, and I know the second she says it that it solves the problem. So I use it. Did she just become the author? Of course not. Why not? Because her idea walked into a process that was already governed by my intent. I evaluated it. I decided whether it served the work. I stayed responsible for the result. Editors do this. Writing partners do this. Friends reading drafts do this. Sometimes one comment from someone else rearranges an entire chapter, and nobody thinks the credit moves. AI introduces a strange version of this, because now the collaborator isn’t a person. I understand why that unsettles people. But before we get into the metaphysics of machines and creativity (that’s another post), there’s a much simpler question sitting right there. Did you use the tool in service of your authorship, or did you hand your authorship over to the tool? That’s the distinction I’m interested in. There’s a difference between authoring a work and commissioning one. “Write me a novel about X,” then publishing whatever comes back, is commissioning. You placed an order, you received a product, you put your name on it. “Here’s the story I’m trying to tell. Here’s what isn’t working. Challenge this scene. Give me ten ways this could go.” Then rejecting eight of them, combining two, rewriting the result, and driving all of it toward a specific vision. That’s a different activity entirely. We already understand this distinction in other creative fields. A film director doesn’t operate the camera. Doesn’t compose the score. Doesn’t perform a single role. Hundreds of people contribute creative work, and plenty of them contribute ideas the director never would have had on his own. We still call it his film. Not because we’re careless with credit, but because someone was governing the whole thing. Holding the vision, making the decisions that mattered, answering for the result. Writing has historically been much more solitary, partly because it had to be. You couldn’t convene a crew at eleven at night to help you find the right sentence. So the solitary nature of the craft became the definition of the craft, and now something that was necessarily a solo endeavor can suddenly become much more conversational and collaborative. None of which means every use of AI preserves authorship. Obviously it doesn’t. But the presence of AI doesn’t automatically destroy it either. The line I care about isn’t human versus machine. It’s assistance versus delegation. At what point am I no longer using a tool to accomplish my intent, but outsourcing the intent itself? At what point am I no longer exercising meaningful judgment, but simply accepting what I’ve been given? At what point am I putting my name on something I’m unwilling or unable to take responsibility for? Those are harder questions than “did a machine touch this,” and they’re the ones that actually separate a writer from someone who commissions a work. Because authorship was never really about keystrokes. It’s about intent, judgment, and responsibility.