What does it mean when we say that computers can ‘write’ and how are recent developments in neural networks and machine learning changing this capacity? This article examines the long-standing literary fear of authorship being replaced by machines while also interrogating the labour and credit implications that sit behind widely used structures of authorship in a technological age. The argument makes reference to one work of computer-generated writing – Johannes Helden & Hakan Jonson’s Evolution [2014] – and to one software paradigm (a character-based recurrent neural networks for language acquisition trained on the corpus of the journal Textual Practice). I here argue that unless we conceive more broadly of the criteria for ‘authorship’ as a labour function, and unless we take seriously the need to see textual production as social production, hybridized (but predominantly) machine identities will come to dominate a literary landscape.

中文翻译：

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伟大的自动语法化器：写作、劳动、计算机

当我们说计算机可以“写作”时，这是什么意思？神经网络和机器学习的最新发展如何改变这种能力？本文探讨了长期以来对机器取代作者身份的文学恐惧，同时还询问了技术时代广泛使用的作者身份结构背后的劳动和信用影响。该论点参考了计算机生成的写作作品——Johannes Helden 和 Hakan Jonson 的 Evolution [2014]——以及一种软件范式（一种基于字符的循环神经网络，用于在 Textual Practice 杂志的语料库上训练的语言习得）。我在这里认为，除非我们将“作者身份”的标准更广泛地设想为一种劳动功能，并且除非我们认真对待将文本生产视为社会生产的必要性，