Striving towards automated writing – Views on authorship in story generation research

This article examines how authorship is approached in story generation research publications. Story generation research forms its own, distinctive context in which computer-generated literary texts are being produced. Through text analysis and comparisons to other forms of computer-generated literature, the article examines what kind of rhetoric is used when the authorship of computer-generated texts is described in this context, and how the roles of the programmers and the program are characterised. The findings suggest that the approach to authorship in story generation research is mainly technical, referring strictly to the production process of the text, and leaving out the meaning of authorship as responsibility and accountability of the work as an aesthetic whole. This technical view affects how human-computer relations are discussed in the research, as "human-generated" and "computer-generated" texts are contrasted with each other. Furthermore, this dichotomy of the human and the machine affects how the produced stories are evaluated.