Artificial Intelligence Systems and problems of the concept of author. Reflections on a recent book

Lana, Maurizio Artificial Intelligence Systems and problems of the concept of author. Reflections on a recent book. JLIS.it, 2022, vol. 13, n. 2, pp. 13-44. [Journal article (Paginated)]

[thumbnail of jlis_458_1.pdf]
Preview
 Text
jlis_458_1.pdf - Published version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (478kB) | Preview

English abstract

The publication of the book Beta Writer. 2019. Lithium-Ion Batteries. A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research. New York, NY: Springer, produced with Artificial Intelligence software prompts analysis and reflections in several areas. First of all, on what Artificial Intelligence systems are able to do in the production of informative texts. This raises the question if and how an Artificial Intelligence software system can be treated as the author of a text it has produced. Evaluating whether this is correct and possible leads to re-examine the current conception for which it is taken for granted that the author is a person. This, in turn, when faced with texts produced by Artificial Intelligence systems necessarily raises the question of whether they, like the author-person, are endowed with agency. The article concludes that Artificial Intelligence systems are characterized by a distributed agency, shared with those who designed them and make them work, and that in the wake of the reflections of 50 years ago by Barthes and Foucault, it is necessary to define and recognize a new type of author.

Italian abstract

La pubblicazione del libro Beta Writer. 2019. Lithium-Ion Batteries. A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research. New York, NY: Springer, prodotto con software di Intelligenza Artificiale sollecita analisi e riflessioni in vari ambiti. Prima di tutto su che cosa i sistemi di Intelligenza Artificiale siano in grado di fare nell’ambito della produzione di testi di tipo informativo. Di qui si pone la questione se e come un sistema software di Intelligenza Artificiale possa essere trattato come autore di un testo che ha prodotto. Valutare se ciò sia corretto e possibile porta a riprendere in esame la concezione attuale per la quale è scontato che l’autore sia una persona. Ciò, a sua volta, di fronte a testi prodotti da sistemi di Intelligenza Artificiale sollecita necessariamente la domanda se essi, come l’autore-persona, siano dotati di agency. L’articolo conclude che i sistemi di Intelligenza Artificiale si caratterizzano per un’agency distribuita, condivisa con chi li ha progettati e li fa funzionare e che sulla scorta delle riflessioni di 50 anni fa di Barthes e Foucault occorre definire e riconoscere un nuovo tipo di autore.

Item type: Journal article (Paginated)
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Texts; Books; Agency; Authorship; Intelligenza Artificiale; Testi; Libri
Date deposited: 15 Sep 2026 05:10
Last modified: 20 Sep 2026 22:24
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/48884

References

Adadi, Amina, e Mohammed Berrada. 2018. «Peeking Inside the Black-Box: A Survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)». IEEE Access 6: 52138–60. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2870052.

Ahearn, Laura M. 1999. «Agency». Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (1/2): 12–15. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.1999.9.1-2.12.

Arora, Neelima, Amit K Banerjee, e Mangamoori L Narasu. 2020. «The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Tackling COVID-19». Future Virology 15 (11): 717–24. https://doi.org/10.2217/fvl-2020-0130.

Barredo Arrieta, Alejandro, Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez, Javier Del Ser, Adrien Bennetot, Siham Tabik, Alberto Barbado, Salvador Garcia, et al. 2020. «Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI». Infor-mation Fusion 58 (giugno): 82–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2019.12.012.

Barthes, Roland. 1967. «The death of the author». Aspen, 1967. https://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes.

———. 1968. «La mort de l’auteur». Manteia, 1968.

———. 1970. «L’ancienne rhétorique. Aide-mémoire». Communications 16 (1): 172–223. https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1970.1236.

Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, e Shmargaret Shmitchell. 2021. «On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?». In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–23. Virtual Event Canada: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.

Bently, Lionel. 2018. «The UK’s Provisions on Computer‐Generated Works: A Solution for AI Creations?» Presentato al ECS International Conference: EU copyright, quo vadis ? From the EU copyright package to the challenges of Artificial Intelligence, Bruxelles. https://europeancopyrightsocietydotorg.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/lionel-the-uk-provisions-on-computer-generated-works.pdf.

Beta Writer. 2019. Lithium-Ion Batteries. A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Rese-arch. New York, NY: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16800-1.

Blair, Ann. 2003. «Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700». Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (1): 11. https://doi.org/10.2307/3654293.

———. 2010. Too much to know: managing scholarly information before the modern age. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press.

Blumenberg, Hans. 2009. La leggibilità del mondo: il libro come metafora della natura. Tra-dotto da Bruno Argenton. Bologna: il Mulino.

Bonaventura da Bagnoregio. 1882. Commentaria in quatuor libros sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi. Vol. I. 4 voll. ad Claras Aquas (Quaracchi, Firenze). https://archive.org/details/operaomnia01bona/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater.

Brainard, Jeffrey, e Jia You. 2018. «What a massive database of retracted papers reveals about science publishing’s ‘death penalty’». Science 25 (ottobre). https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/what-massive-database-retracted-papers-reveals-about-science-publishing-s-death-penalty.

Branwen, Gwern. 2020. «GPT-3 Creative Fiction». Essays • Gwern.net. 19 giugno 2020. https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3.

Brayne, Sarah. 2020. «Enter the Dragnet». Logic Magazine, 20 dicembre 2020. https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/.

Carpenter, Todd A. 2021. «Where Does Enhancement End and Citation Begin?». The Scho-larly Kitchen (blog). 6 ottobre 2021. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/10/06/semantic-enrichment-of-articles-is-different-from-citation/.

Choudhury, Majumdar Roy, Alia Aoun, Dina Badawy, Luis Antonio de Alburquerque Bacar-dit, Yassine Marjane, e Adrian Wilkinson. 2021. «Final report of the Panel of Experts on Li-bya established pursuant to Security Council resolution 1973 (2011)». S/2021/229. United Nations Security Council.

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. 1988. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/enacted/data.pdf.

Crawford, Kate. 2021. Atlas of Ai: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Dickey, Megan Rose. 2021. «Google fires top AI ethics researcher Margaret Mitchell». Te-chCrunch (blog). 19 febbraio 2021. https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/19/google-fires-top-ai-ethics-researcher-margaret-mitchell/.

Durante, Massimo. 2019. Potere computazionale: l’impatto delle ICT su diritto, società, sa-pere. Filosofia delle scienze e dintorni 3. Milano: Meltemi.

EDPB. 2021. «EDPB & EDPS call for ban on use of AI for automated recognition of human features in publicly accessible spaces, and some other uses of AI that can lead to unfair di-scrimination». European Data Protection Board. giugno 2021. https://edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2021/edpb-edps-call-ban-use-ai-automated-recognition-human-features-publicly-accessible_en.

Elsevier. 2021. «Topics - ScienceDirect». Elsevier.Com. 2021. https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/topics.

Engelbart, Douglas. 1962. «Augmenting human intellect: a conceptual framework.» AFOSR-3233. Menlo Park, CA: Stanford Research Institute. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/289565.pdf.

Engelbart, Douglas, e William K. English. 1968. «A research center for augmenting human intellect». In AFIPS Conference Proceedings of the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, 33:395–410. San Francisco. https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4/sloan/mousesite/Archive/ResearchCenter1968/ResearchCenter1968.html.

European Parliament. Directorate General for Internal Policies of the Union. 2020. «Artificial Intelligence and Civil Liability». Publications Office. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2861/220466.

«Final Report of the National Commission on New Technology Uses of Copyrighted Works, Chapter 3 – Computers and Copyright. New Works». 1975. National Commission on New Technology Uses. http://digital-law-online.info/CONTU/contu17.html.

Floridi, Luciano. 2021. «The European Legislation on AI: A Brief Analysis of Its Philosophi-cal Approach». Philosophy & Technology 34 (2): 215–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-021-00460-9.

Floridi, Luciano, e Josh Cowls. 2019. «A Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society». Harvard Data Science Review 1 (1). https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.8cd550d1.

Floridi, Luciano, Josh Cowls, Monica Beltrametti, Raja Chatila, Patrice Chazerand, Virginia Dignum, Christoph Luetge, Robert Madelin, Ugo Pagallo, e Francesca Rossi. 2018. «AI4People—an ethical framework for a good AI society: opportunities, risks, principles, and recommendations». Minds and Machines 28 (4): 689–707. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-018-9482-5.

Floridi, Luciano, Mariarosaria Taddeo, e Matteo Turilli. 2009. «Turing’s Imitation Game: Still an Impossible Challenge for All Machines and Some Judges––An Evaluation of the 2008 Loebner Contest». Minds and Machines 19 (1): 145–50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-008-9130-6.

Foucault, Michel. 1969. «Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?» Bulletin de la Société Française de Philo-sophie 63 (3): 73–104. http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault319.html.

Genette, Gérard. 2002. Seuils. Points Essais 474. Paris: Seuil.

Ginzburg, Carlo. 1979. «Spie. Radici di un paradigma indiziario». In Crisi della ragione. Nuovi modelli nel rapporto tra sapere e attività umane, a cura di Aldo Gargani, 1–30. Torino: Einaudi.

Goodwin, Ross. 2016a. «Narrated reality». Master thesis, New York: New York University.

———. 2016b. «Adventures in Narrated Reality». Medium (blog). 9 giugno 2016. https://medium.com/artists-and-machine-intelligence/adventures-in-narrated-reality-6516ff395ba3.

Goodwin, Ross, Kenric McDowell, e Hélène Planquelle. 2018. 1 the road. Art + machines 1. Paris: Jean Boîte éditions.

GPT-3. 2020. «A Robot Wrote This Entire Article. Are You Scared yet, Human?» The Guar-dian, 8 settembre 2020. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3.

Gruppo di Esperti MISE sull’intelligenza artificiale. 2020. «Proposte per una Strategia italiana per l’intelligenza artificiale». Roma: MISE. https://www.mise.gov.it/images/stories/documenti/Proposte_per_una_Strategia_italiana_AI.pdf.

Gubrium, Jaber F., e James A. Holstein. 1995. «Individual agency, the ordinary, and postmo-dern life». Sociological Quarterly 36 (3): 555–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1995.tb00453.x.

Guerrini, Mauro. 2020. Dalla catalogazione alla metadatazione: tracce di un percorso. Collana Percorsi AIB 5. Roma: Associazione italiana biblioteche.

Gunning, David, e David Aha. 2019. «DARPA’s Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) Program». AI Magazine 40 (2): 44–58. https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v40i2.2850.

Hagan, Martin T., Howard B. Demuth, e Mark H. Beale. 1996. Neural network design. 1st ed. Boston: PWS Pub.

Hao, Karen. 2020. «“I Started Crying”: Inside Timnit Gebru’s Last Days at Google». MIT Te-chnology Review, 16 dicembre 2020. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/16/1014634/google-ai-ethics-lead-timnit-gebru-tells-story/.

———. 2021. «Stop Talking about AI Ethics. It’s Time to Talk about Power.» MIT Techno-logy Review, 23 aprile 2021. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/23/1023549/kate-crawford-atlas-of-ai-review/.

Haski-Leventhal, Debbie. 2020. «The Way Forward in Higher Education». In The Purpose-Driven University, 133–45. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83867-283-620201011.

ICCU. 2009. Regole italiane di catalogazione: REICAT. Roma: ICCU.

IFLA. 2020. «IFLA Statement on Libraries and Artificial Intelligence». https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/93397.

Kaindl, Markus, e Stephanie Preuss. 2020. «How can AI support the research community in times of crisis?» The Source (blog). 1 aprile 2020. https://www.springernature.com/gp/researchers/the-source/blog/blogposts-life-in-research/how-can-ai-support-the-research-community-in-times-of-crisis/17852232.

Kallenborn, Zachary. 2021. «Was a Flying Killer Robot Used in Libya? Quite Possibly». Bul-letin of the Atomic Scientists (blog). 20 maggio 2021. https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/was-a-flying-killer-robot-used-in-libya-quite-possibly/.

Lana, Maurizio. 2020. Introduzione all’information literacy. Editrice Bibliografica. https://www.editricebibliografica.it/scheda-libro/maurizio-lana/introduzione-allinformation-literacy-9788893570862-579327.html.

Larson, Jeff, Mattu Surya, Lauren Kirchner, e Julia Angwin. 2016. «How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm». ProPublica, Maggio 2016. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm?token=pc1OkzviktiLco0hJY5BDRPpI44H_bKV.

Licklider, J. C. R. 1960a. «Man-Computer Symbiosis». IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1 (1): 4–11. https://doi.org/10.1109/THFE2.1960.4503259.

Licklider, J.C.R. 1960b. «Man-computer symbiosis». IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, HFE-1, marzo, 4–19.

McCarthy, John, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, e Claude Elwood Shannon. 1955. «A proposal for the Dartmouth summer research project on Artificial Intelligence». http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html.

———. 2006. «A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence». AI Magazine 27 (4): 3. https://aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/issue/view/165.

Mehan, Hugh, e Houston Wood. 1975. The Reality of Ethnomethodology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Mittelstadt, Brent. 2019. «Principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AI». Nature Machine Intelligence 1 (11): 501–7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0114-4.

Office of Technology Assessment. 1986. «Intellectual property rights in an age of electronics and information». OTA-CIT-302. Washington, DC: U.S. Congress. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc39611/m2/1/high_res_d/8610.pdf.

«Projects and Cooperations - Applied Computational Linguistics Lab Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany». s.d. Consultato 1 luglio 2021. http://www.acoli.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/projects.html.

Proposta di Regolamento del Parlamento Europeo e del Consiglio che stabilisce regole ar-monizzate sull’Intelligenza Artificiale (legge sull’Intelligenza Artificiale) e modifica alcuni atti legislativi dell’Unione. 2021. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/IT/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52021PC0206&from=EN.

Raji, Inioluwa Deborah, Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell, Joy Buolamwini, Joonseok Lee, e Emily Denton. 2020. «Saving Face: Investigating the Ethical Concerns of Facial Recognition Auditing». In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 145–51. New York NY USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3375627.3375820.

Samuelson, Pamela. 1985. «Allocating ownership rights in computer-generated works». University of Pittsburgh Law Review 47: 1185–1228.

———. 2020. «AI Authorship?» Communications of the ACM 63 (7): 20–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3401718.

Schoenenberger, Henning, Christian Chiarcos, e Niko Schenk. 2019. «Preface». In Lithium-Ion Batteries. A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research. New York, NY: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16800-1.

Shapiro, Susan P. 2005. «Agency theory». Annu. Rev. Sociol. 31: 263–84. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.31.041304.122159.

Springer Nature. 2019. «Springer Nature Publishes Its First Machine-Generated Book». Www.Springer.Com (blog). 2 aprile 2019. https://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/press-releases/corporate/springer-nature-machine-generated-book/16590126.

Strubell, Emma, Ananya Ganesh, e Andrew McCallum. 2019. «Energy and Policy Considera-tions for Deep Learning in NLP». In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Associa-tion for Computational Linguistics, 3645–50. Florence, Italy: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P19-1355.

Svenonius, Elaine. 2000. The intellectual foundation of information organization. Digital li-braries and electronic publishing. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Taddeo, Mariarosaria, e Luciano Floridi. 2018. «How AI Can Be a Force for Good». Science 361 (6404): 751–52. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat5991.

Turing, A. M. 1950. «Computing Machinery and Intelligence». Mind LIX (236): 433–60. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433.

United Nations, e David Kaye. 2018. «Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression». A/73/348. New York: United Nations.

U.S. Copyright Office. 2021. Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office practices. III. Washin-gton, DC.

Vetere, Guido. 2021. «L’intelligenza artificiale “stona” ancora: i limiti della generazione au-tomatica di musica». Agenda Digitale (blog). 20 aprile 2021. https://www.agendadigitale.eu/cultura-digitale/lintelligenza-artificiale-stona-ancora-i-limiti-della-generazione-automatica-di-musica/.

Vuong, Quan‐Hoang. 2020. «The Limitations of Retraction Notices and the Heroic Acts of Authors Who Correct the Scholarly Record: An Analysis of Retractions of Papers Published from 1975 to 2019». Learned Publishing 33 (2): 119–30. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1282.

Wang, Sun-Chong. 2003. «Artificial Neural Network». In Interdisciplinary Computing in Java Programming, di Sun-Chong Wang, 81–100. Boston, MA: Springer US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0377-4_5.

Yang, Guang-Zhong, Jim Bellingham, Pierre E. Dupont, Peer Fischer, Luciano Floridi, Robert Full, Neil Jacobstein, et al. 2018. «The Grand Challenges of Science Robotics». Science Robotics 3 (14): eaar7650. https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aar7650.


Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item
Contact us
Send email Sponsors
Sponsor: AIMS Sponsor: D&P Sponsor: UniNa CAB Get connected
Facebook Facebook Twitter Twitter Linkedin LinkedIn RSS RSS