Algorithmic Storytelling and Vernacular Folklore: Rewriting the Nenek Pakande Monster in the Age of Generative AI

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has unsettled long -standing assumptions about authorship, originality, and authenticity in literary and cultural production. While debates often focus on academic writing or creative industries in the Global North, less attention has been given to how AI -mediated rewriting affects vernacular narrative traditions. This article examines the Indonesian folklore figure Nenek Pakande through the lens of ecological dramaturgy to explore how algorithmic text generation reshapes narrative voice and cultural memory. Drawing on conceptual analysis and comparative rewriting experiments, the study argues that AI does not merely redistribute authorship but transforms its ontological conditions by introducing non -experiential textual agency. In doing so, it reconfigures originality from inventive subjectivity to probabilistic recombination and reframes authenticity as a question of relational accountability rather than textual purity. By situating folkloric rewriting within the dynamics of algorithmic culture, this article proposes a model of hybrid ecological authorship that acknowledges technological mediation while maintaining ethical responsibility toward cultural and ecological specificity. Rather than positioning AI as either threat or tool, the paper advances a relational framework for understanding writing in the age of distributed cognition.