Autofiction and Auto-Fiction: Notions of Authorship in the Era of AI

As Hywel Dix has noted, while French-language scholarship has spent several decades engaging with autofictional literature it is only relatively recently that the study of autofiction has emerged as a major topic of interest in English-language criticism. Autofictional texts blur the boundaries between biography and fiction, and writer and character, in ways that highlight the constructed nature of authorship and narrative identity. Recent advances in machine learning that have led to the development of large language models capable of producing complex and sophisticated text prompt us to reconsider ideas of authorship and authenticity in similar ways when considering text generated by machines. While the outputs of large language models are growing more and more sophisticated, the algorithms they are built on inherently lack direct access to embodied experience and have no understanding of what it means to live in the world. Instead, these models rely upon complex layers of algorithms trained upon enormous sets of textual data to create statistical models that can output text which mimics the human writing they have been trained upon. This paper outlines an approach to creative writing which incorporates both human autofiction and mechanical auto-fiction to explore notions of authorship in the age of artificial intelligence. This approach troubles notions of narrative identity and authorship by situating an autobiographical exploration of complex family dynamics within a speculative plot in which the protagonist is forced to confront their own human authenticity, and incorporates machine-generated text produced by a bespoke language model. Through the lens of creative practice, this paper will demonstrate the ways in which notions of authorship can be troubled by contrasting the role of the writer in autobiographical fiction and the use of machine-generated text in creative work.

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IABA Asia-Pacific x ASAL 2025 Conference: The Story and The Self: Navigating Truth Genres in Literature

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