> Are people who employ LLM to generate text really authors?

They aren't.  The writers whose works were stolen to train the LLMs
are, however.

On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 9:48 AM Eric Lease Morgan
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> On May 15, 2025, at 2:45 PM, Gabe Ormsby wrote:
>
> > If they are not in fact "budding songwriters," but rather, "budding prompt
> > engineers," then by all means send them to an "AI song generator."
> >
> > But if you want to serve them properly in their desire to actually become
> > songwriters, you're going to have to figure out where they are in their
> > journey and guide them accordingly. They'll need some mix of the following
> > skills. Each of these has their own host of resources online. I'm only
> > going to drop in recommendations that I know off hand:
> >
> > - How to compose a melody: A lot of people just muddle through making up
> > their own. If they want to do All the Music Theory first, move down this
> > list...
> >
> > - How to compose an arrangement: What instruments do they want? What chord
> > progressions, rhythmic accompaniment? Vocals? Much of this is decisions
> > they'll have to make on their own, but again, music theory can help. I'm
> > sure there's a lot  for that.
> >
> > - How to write down their arrangement: Music notation software. I suggest
> > MuseScore (https://musescore.org)
> >
> > - How to record from a computer/phone/tablet using virtual instruments
> >
> > - How to play an instrument: Lots of online options
> >
> > - How to record to a computer/phone/tablet using "real" instruments:
> > GarageBand, Reaper (https://www.reaper.fm)
> >
> > - How to start getting paid or find work by writing songs...I got nothing,
> > but I'm sure there are opinions, maybe some real guidance, online somewhere.
> >
> > I'm sure I'm forgetting something.
> >
> > --
> > Gabe Ormsby
> > Web Application Developer
> > University of Minnesota Libraries
>
>
> Just yesterday I read an article which echoes, reflects, and elaborates on the ideas outlined above, and in the end it advocates for something called "distant writing" or "WrAIting". [1, 2]
>
> More specifically, the author first compares and contrasts distant reading with close reading, and then they compare and contrast traditional writing with "distant writing", where distant writing is a lot about understanding prompt engineering, understanding different literary styles, and understanding different literary genres. After a person really and truely understands these things, a computer program is directed to generate a narrative.
>
> Put another way, distant writing is more about designing things and less about actual sentence construction. This is akin to an architect who designs a building. I. M. Pei is given credit for the building even though he did not actually build it. Beethoven is given credit for his symphonies even though he does not perform them. Artists like Raphael may have sketched an image, but others did the actual painting. A paragraph from page 10 of the article brings the point home:
>
>   Creative writing pedagogy may increasingly emphasise
>   meta-literary awareness: understanding genre conventions,
>   narrative structures, and stylistic patterns at a systematic
>   level. While traditional writing instruction often teaches these
>   elements implicitly through practice distant writing requires
>   explicit knowledge of these patterns to design prompts
>   cffectively. Students would need to analyse and articulate the
>   structural and stylistic features they wish to reproduce or
>   transform in their work. In short distant writing requires close
>   writing and reading.
>
> Such is kinda sorta scarey to me, but things evolve. Oral traditions commited to writing have never gone over very well, but writing persists. Think Homer. Photography made it easy for people to share visual perspectives, especially when it came to portraits. How many selfies have you shared? Heck, think of the implementation of our venerable online public access catalogs and how they navigated people away from browsing the stacks, yet scholarship is exploding.
>
> Are people who employ LLM to generate text really authors? I don't know, yet.
>
> Personally, my tack is to learn about the technology, practice with it, and then use it when I think, feel, and believe it is appropriate. Your milage may vary.  :)
>
>
> [1] "Distant Writing: Literary Production in the Age of Artificial
>     Intelligence" by Luciano Floridi
>     https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5232088
>
> [2] a temporarily available and personally annoted version
>     https://distantreader.org/tmp/floridi-distant-2025.pdf
>
> --
> Eric Morgan
> University of Notre Dame