Examining descriptions of authorship of works written with ChatGPT

"With technological advances that enable new methods of text generation, the idea of machine authorship resurfaces to the public discussion again and again. Such is also the case with the newest major development: large language models (LLMs). The easy and free-to-use programs such as ChatGPT have led to a surge of LLM generated books on Amazon.

In this presentation I take a look at how authorship is presented in the descriptions and other metadata on books published under the category of “Literature & Fiction” that have marked ChatGPT as their author. I examine how often the authorship is brought up in these introductory texts and in what light it is presented.

From these paratexts, patterns such as the anthropomorphisation of ChatGPT, juxtaposition of “the human” and “the machine” authors, as well as the popularity of imitation and pastiche, emerge."

About the presenter

Tuuli Hongisto is a PhD student majoring in comparative literature at the University of Helsinki. She has a background in comparative literature and would like to get involved with other researchers in the field of electronic literature. Computer-generated literature has interested her for a while now and she had computer science as a minor in her master’s degree.

Her MA thesis was on the topic of "Essential narrative features in story-generating algorithms”, focusing on what characteristics of narrative the developers of story-generation programs regarded as most desirable (in programs developed in the context of research into computational creativity, such as Tale-Spin, Minstrel and Mexica).