AI as Ideal Other?: Bakhtinian Perspectives on AI-Mediated Authorship

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Abstract

This paper considers the growing discourse around authorship in the era of generative AI through Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and answerability. It examines recent AI-generated and AI-augmented journalistic and literary experiments in which AI is positioned as an “ideal other” in the creative process. “The Algorithm,” a vignette from James Hannaham’s Pilot Imposter, describes an imagined experiment in AI co-authorship as an ideal post-human dialogue: “How generous of it, I thought, how selfless of this algorithm, how well it has studied and known me, almost to have loved me, that it has absorbed me so completely it can offer up its writing to me as me, that it will allow me to use the words it has generated to further my aims, my ambitions, my dreams.” This speculative account raises profound questions about the nature of co-authorship mediated by AI, which, although rooted in the vast heteroglossia of LLM training data, remains detached from specific times, places, or social contexts—essentially unanswerable. The paper questions the dialogic nature of such interactions and examines how the lack of answerability impacts the ethical and philosophical dimensions of authorship mediated by artificial intelligence.

Author

• Kit Pribble, Wake Forest U