Who is the muse? Prompt writing, AI poets, and the sympoietic author-function

Abstract

The author, in the conventional sense, was already fragile; but within an AI-mediated literary ecosystem, the instability of the idea of a singular author stands further decentered. What is at stake is not the “death” of the author, but the redistribution of the functions historically assigned to it. In AI-mediated writing systems, intention, coherence, responsibility, and origin no longer align. The “author” in this sense is less a subject than a site of passage between a sequence of operations, each inhabited by different forms of agency. The displacement of purpose, which is projected through the prompt, changed through probabilistic creation, and reassembled through actions of reading, selection, critique, and revision, is crucial to this reconfiguration. The prompt operates as a site of meta-authorship, relocating writing from inscription to instruction and structuring the conditions under which textuality emerges without determining it in advance. Within this iterative loop, the subject oscillates between roles of a prompter, a reader, and a critic. I propose a sympoietic author-function, a form of collective, relational authorship that decenters the human without complete erasure. The paper further outlines an ethics of sympoietic authorship, shifting the question from ownership to responsibility within distributed networks of creation, emphasizing process transparency, relational accountability, and interpretive responsibility.