Am I a 'Writer'?

Why We Need New Language for AI-Assisted Creation

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been serializing my book The Detection Deception here on The Augmented Educator, using AI tools in my writing process. This is a fact I’ve disclosed in my ethics and AI statement. But as I prepare each installment, I find myself returning to a question that initially seemed simple but has revealed itself to be anything but:

What do I call myself in relation to my book?

Am I a “writer?” An “author?” These terms feel simultaneously accurate and inadequate. I conceive ideas, structure arguments, revise and refine. But I also prompt, curate, and collaborate with systems that generate text I never could have written alone. The traditional vocabulary of creation strains under this new reality.

This question matters more than semantics suggest. Throughout my work here, I’ve argued multiple times that we must shift the value proposition of creation from artifact to process—from the essay that appears on this blog to the thinking that produced it. If that’s true, then the term “writer” becomes crucial. It’s the word that locates the source of that process and identifies where creative labor happens, where meaning originates. To use it carelessly in an age of AI-assisted creation isn’t just sloppy, it’s potentially deceptive.

However, what truly stands out is this: like many AI-related issues, we’ve encountered this situation before. History is littered with moments when new tools forced creators to confront uncomfortable questions about their identity and the authenticity of their work. What can these historical parallels teach us about our current moment? And might they even suggest that we need not just to defend old terms but create new ones instead?

When the Printing Press Made Writers

Our current concept of authorship is itself a technological artifact. The concept of a “writer” or “author” as a sole originator of a fixed text didn’t emerge until the printing press was invented.

According to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s work on medieval scribal culture, a “writer” or “scribe” was perceived as a skilled worker, someone who channeled established knowledge into physical form. The concept of “originality” was largely absent; knowledge belonged to collective inheritance. Each manuscript, painstakingly copied by hand, existed in a fluid state, constantly evolving through copying. The scribe’s role was preservation and transmission, not innovation.

The printing press changed everything through standardization and dissemination. Identical copies could be distributed widely, and knowledge could be preserved without corruption. But most significantly, print culture created a fixed personality for the author, linking a specific work to a single creator’s name.

This shift directly gave birth to modern authorship, fostering new notions of individuality, originality, and creativity. It enabled the Romantic ideal of the “genius” as a creator whose work arises from internal inspiration rather than channeling tradition. The writer as originator, as unique creative voice, is not a timeless truth about human creativity. It’s a construct of print technology.

And if it was technology that transformed how we define a “writer,” then why do we think that definition is set in stone?

The Photographer Who Wasn’t an Artist

The advent of photography caused a crisis that was surprisingly like the one we’re experiencing now. Charles Baudelaire’s influential 1859 essay “The Modern Public and Photography” launched a fierce attack on the new medium, arguing it catered to base desires for “accuracy over beauty” and would corrupt art by enslaving artists to external reality. Photography should remain the “humble servant of the sciences and arts,” never a creative peer. Critics derided it as “thoughtless mechanism for replication” lacking “refined feeling and sentiment.”

Sounds familiar? It should. Concerns that AI just imitates and remixes, doesn’t have genuine emotions, and endangers original creativity are remarkably similar to the worries about cameras that arose in the 19th century.

But photography didn’t destroy painting. One could argue that it liberated it. By mastering mechanical reproduction, photography liberated painters from simply copying reality. Artists could explore subjectivity, emotion, abstraction—aspects cameras couldn’t capture. It was photography that facilitated Impressionism and modern art.

Walter Benjamin theorized this in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” introducing the concept of “aura,” the unique presence an original artwork possesses through its existence in a specific time and place. Mechanical reproduction destroys this aura, shifting art’s function from “cult value” (ritual and uniqueness) to “exhibition value” (accessibility and mass viewership). Benjamin saw both loss and democratizing possibility: reproduction made art accessible to the masses, transforming it into a basis for discourse.

The pattern: a technology condemned as inauthentic and mechanical forced radical re-evaluation of an entire field, redefining value itself. The “artist” didn’t disappear, but the term came to mean something fundamentally different after photography.