La ridefinizione dell’autorialità nell’AI Novel

The article provides theoretical reflections on authorship and creativity of texts generated by Artificial Intelligence systems. The term ‘AI Novel’ is suggested to refer to texts generated by AI with literary purposes. Since the story of The day a computer writes a novel (2015), the spectral nature assumed by the authorial instance in texts generated by Ai becomes evident. Italo Calvino’s essay Cybernetics and Ghosts (1967) is used as a starting point to define the authorship in the text automatically generated: it’s no longer the creation of a single author, but it’s a collaborative process between human and non-human entities. The article also underlines the importance of human intervention through the different stages of the automated production. Finally, the theoretical reflections of Ross Goodwin, the creator of the AI novel 1 The road (2018), the work of the visual artist Anna Ridler, and the Rocco Tanica’s Non siamo mai stati sulla Terra (2022) book are examined. These three cases are analysed both for their re-definition of authorship, and for their insight between ‘hallucination’ of AI systems and creativity concepts and distance from the tradition.