Authenticity and Authorship Beyond the Algorithm: Action, Institution, and Epistemic Responsibility under Generative AI

This paper examines whether generative artificial intelligence can be considered an authentic author. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate advanced linguistic competence and produce coherent academic discourse, they foreground unresolved questions concerning the ontology of authorship and the status of authenticity in scholarly authorship. The article is concerned with authorship rather than writing as such; writing is treated as the practical and institutional site through which authorship becomes visible, contested, and assigned.

Rather than treating authorship as a property of textual output, the paper conceptualises it as an activity across three intersecting perspectives: praxis, institutional recognition, and epistemic responsibility. Extending Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, authorship is theorised in terms of linguistic labour, linguistic work, and linguistic action, with authenticity located in linguistic action as public, accountable, position -taking engagement. A Foucauldian perspective reframes authorship as an institutional function governed by discursive norms, while the epistemic perspective examines whether LLMs satisfy conditions such as semantic understanding, grounding, and epistemic commitment.

The paper argues that AI can perform linguistic labour, support linguistic work, and approximate institutional markers of authorship, but cannot initiate linguistic action or assume epistemic responsibility.