The deixis of literature: On the conditions for recognizing computers as authors

Abstract

Taking the deictic judgment that is the modernist gesture of declaring something to be art as a starting point, this essay suggests an analogous deixis as a necessary condition for literature. This deixis also can serve as the basis for discussing the expectations of computer‐generated texts. Against the idea that computers or AI systems need only produce sufficiently good output in order to be considered authors, the essay proposes an approach that takes the social recognition of the deictic act within a community of judgment as a precondition for authorship. As an alternative to the Turing test, which is based on the paradigm of deception (people are tricked into considering computer‐written text to be written by humans), the essay favors a version of Susan Leigh Star's “Durkheim test,” which is based on the paradigm of co‐sociality (people directly recognize computers as social actors). Only if the gesture of a machine declaring something to be art is recognized as a deictic judgment in the full sense can one plausibly speak of computer authorship.