Abstract How is artificial intelligence altering our understandings of academic authorship? While the uptake of AI might appear to require a radical revisioning of our notions of authorship, in fact, it highlights long‐standing notions of collective and individual authorial responsibility, as demonstrated through the first human engagements with the ELIZA computer program. Pitched in the 1960s as AI capable of engaging in psychoanalytic interviews, ELIZA illuminates the necessary give‐and‐take between authors and their interlocutors. Employing M. M. Bakhtin's notion of answerability, I suggest, enables us to examine the dual sides of authorship that ELIZA and more recent forms of AI reveal: as engagement in a call‐and‐response (between author and audience) and as a form of accountability. Drawing from my experiences as the editor‐in‐chief of American Ethnologist , I examine AI's impact on the collective and individualized nature of academic authorship today.
Susanna Trnka (Tue,) studied this question.