Angels leave footprints, too (2, final)

GPT (contd):

We've spent quite a lot of time establishing one proposition:
AI can remove the visible authorial self and still produce something recognisably human.
To Autumn was almost a laboratory experiment for this.
Keats deliberately suppresses himself. The objects do the work.
The Way Home pushed it further: remove the schoolgirl's elaborate interiority, and somehow the story became more emotionally resonant.
But the next question is:
What if AI can do the opposite?

What if, by absorbing an enormous quantity of human writing, AI becomes capable of constructing convincing representations of:
- grief;
- embarrassment;
- nostalgia;
- jealousy;
- religious longing;
- exile;
- sexual awkwardness;
- childhood;
- ageing;
- bereavement;
- political fear;
- the feeling of returning somewhere after decades away;
not because it has experienced them, but because language contains an extraordinary amount of information about how humans experience them?

That is a much more dangerous question for the traditional humanist argument.
Because then the answer to:
“But AI hasn't lived.”
becomes:
“No. But perhaps it has read almost everything we've written about living.”

And that doesn't establish that AI feels any of those things. It establishes something much more modest and much more interesting: it may be able to manipulate the linguistic representations through which humans recognise those things in one another.

Watching the wheels turn

GPT (contd):

That's the “linguistic machinery” idea.

Which brings us back to the angels.

The angels are not the source of the world they walk through. They don't replace the people. They don't explain the miracle.

They are another presence moving through the causal landscape, apparently invisible, but leaving footprints.

That's rather close to what you're describing AI as becoming in literature.

Not:
AI replaces the human writer.

Nor:
AI is merely a dumb tool like a typewriter.

Something much stranger:
AI becomes an active participant in the chain by which human experience is converted into language and then converted back into human experience in the reader.

Man versus machine is too crude.
The real object of study is the whole chain.

And that, incidentally, is why I think your phrase “medium of production” matters. A typewriter isn't neutral either. It changes what can be produced, how quickly, how comfortably, what gets revised, what gets discarded. The computer changed that again. AI changes it again. The reader changes the final event too.

I'd put it like this:

Biography is one ingredient in the production of literature, not necessarily its sovereign source.

Or, even better:

The writer is one participant in a much larger chain of production and reception.