Digital Literary Consciousness: Exploring AI as Author, Reader, and Critic

Abstract

The advent of artificial intelligence as an agent in literary creation, reading, and evaluation indicates an essential restructuring of what we in this paper refer to as digital literary consciousness. Based on the post-structuralist literary theory and, specifically, the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as on the digital humanities studies and ethical theories, this paper will be able to analyse the various functions that AI currently holds in the literary ecosystem. It proposes the idea that the concept of authorship as a singular human action should be rethought as a distributed, collaborative and algorithmically mediated process. AI serves as an author in four types of algorithmic authorship: fully text-generated, human-directed collaboration, adaptive interactive story, and intertextual remix. As the reader, AI does stylometric analysis, sentiment mapping, extracts narrative structure, and gives a recommendation; however, the interpretive authority of the work is subject to algorithmic bias and alignment problems. AI can provide computational stylistics and thematic evaluation at scale, but not human ethical, aesthetic or cultural judgment, as a critic. The paper situates these changes in the wider historical context from oral tradition to print culture to digital media, and explores the ethical and legal issues of plagiarism, attribution, representation, and labour, concluding with pedagogical implications for teaching literature in the age of intelligent machines.