Jake Lawrence · Authorship Studies / STS / Media Theory · The Interface Layer theme
The AI diligence statement is a new genre. Read across ten disciplines, it turns out to be a signature: not a confession of AI use, but the act of taking authorship of an assisted work.
A clause-by-clause reading of the AI diligence statement Anthropic published for its AI Fluency course, taken through ten disciplines: literary theory (Barthes, Foucault), the history of the scribe and the amanuensis, scientific contributorship (ICMJE, CRediT), the law's human-authorship requirement (the Copyright Office, Thaler v. Perlmutter), the philosophy of intention (Grice, Frankfurt on bullshit), the economics of credit (Merton), media theory (Benjamin's aura), the perverse effects of disclosure (Cain, Loewenstein, and Moore), and classification as infrastructure (Bowker and Star). Five interactive components: an annotated statement, a contribution ledger, a responsibility test, a disclosure dial, and a composer that writes your own. Ends where it began, with the author signing.
Classification as Infrastructure names the residual category in the abstract. Signed, With Assistance reads a live one: the diligence statement sorts the making of a text into human and machine, and everything real happens in the seam it cannot draw.
Stance Design finds an invisible product decision about how an AI treats you. Signed, With Assistance finds an invisible authorial decision about how a human answers for what the AI helped write. Both are choices the reader never sees getting made.
Seeing Like an AI Company watches a company classify the AI industry. Signed, With Assistance watches a company classify the act of writing, in a disclosure statement that is itself a small piece of governance.
Both apply Bowker and Star to a document that became infrastructure without meaning to. The Invisible Architecture traces it in psychiatric diagnosis; Signed, With Assistance traces it in the byline.
The New Sorting Hat watches AI detection decide which students wrote their own work. Signed, With Assistance asks the same question from the other side of the desk, and answers it with a signature instead of a detector.
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