By Lázara Ávila Fernández

I believe in writing as the result of the individual as a conscious being: the conscious agent who observes a phenomenon and is capable of bringing art into the word and taking others to unimaginable places, societies, and worlds. I am referring to the craft, to the act of thought, not to vulgar copying, much less to the output as authorship or co-creation. I am referring to that which endures through time and even death.

Authorship, the act of authorship—not its modern institutionalization—is anthropologically prior and geographically universal. There was a creative act in the Homeric tradition without signature or copyright; in Persian oral traditions; in the caveman who left his mark on the walls of the cave; in the civilizations of the Aztecs and the Maya.

The modern institution of the author—individualized, proprietary, and legally regulated—is European; the act of authorship is prior and has to do with the genesis of signifying. And up to this point, the question of authorship, of the author, is only a matter of how each writer conceives of themselves and of the act they perform. There are other readings, of course, such as the one formulated by Roland Barthes in his essay The Death of the Author, which, with the arrival of language models, has gained renewed force.

Barthes suspends the author as interpretive authority and as guarantor of an ultimate meaning. Extrapolating what Barthes said in 1967 to the current relation between the Human Domain and the Algorithmic Domain is not appropriate. Language models produce a quasi-sign and do not represent the death of the author. There is no author within; there is no continuity of the act of signifying. The materializations of that act were transduced into data, thereby interrupting the continuity that linked them to the act and to its conditions of possibility.

The output, on its own, offers no criterion of semiotic or authorial relevance that would allow authorship or co-creation to be attributed to the quasi-sign or to the language model. Relevance, in any case, belongs to the auctor, to that modern author who, impelled by the advance of new technologies, does not seek to sanctify their place, but rather to vindicate the true act, which consists in founding, making grow, and answering for what has been said.

Note: This text is an excerpt from Augere: The Death of the Author. The English version was translated from the original Spanish with the assistance of AI-based translation tools and subsequently revised to preserve the book’s conceptual terminology, argumentative structure, and authorial intent.