The Death of the Author

Simulacra, Substacks, Shrooms, and the Struggle for Meaning

“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” – Sol Lewitt

“To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” - Soren Kierkegaard

The last couple of weeks I’ve been painting my kitchen and bathroom and catching up on long-overdue house projects. My kids and wife are back at school. Summer was good — I spent more time writing than I have in years, and I tried new things: pickleball, painting, home improvement. The job search continues…

To the extent that social media algorithms mirror our fascinations, mine has locked onto a weakness: flirtations with danger. My Instagram reels feed me sharks circling swimmers. Giant waves swallowing surfers. Skiers outracing avalanches. Hikers on knife-edge ridge.s I have a neurotic fear of heights, so I watch with a mix of awe and disgust — best summed up by one aggregator’s catchphrase: #menahdodis.In this post, I want to step back from the dizzying ledge that we flirted with in my recent more political posts and return to more reflective ground.

My Introduction to AI

I started using AI chatbots as a lark — generating comic content, pushing them into silly corners. Then I had my first “wow” moment.

A demanding client wanted a vague, grandiose project. I spent months revising a scope that never satisfied him. In frustration, I turned to ChatGPT. With a simple prompt, it produced in seconds what had taken me months. The client loved it. I was convinced.

Later I discovered the elegant scope hadn’t changed the truth: the project was just as ill-conceived as I had sensed. AI helped me satisfy the client, but it hadn’t solved the real technical challenges. That tension — between what feels persuasive and what proves authentic — stuck with me.

Another early use was scenario planning. Asked to imagine future transportation use cases, I would normally spend hours in whiteboard sessions. With AI, I could generate twenty scenarios in seconds, skim the list, and refine the best ones. It wasn’t always consistent, but with iteration it grew sharper. It could apply frameworks, recognize patterns, even surprise me with connections I hadn’t considered.

Compared to colleagues, AI was faster, broader, more responsive. Precisely because it lacked specialization and self-censorship, it was a better brainstormer. Many ideas were bad and few original, but it solved the biggest creative problem: the blank page. While I was wary of asking AI for solutions, I found it excellent at brainstorming questions.

With AI, I censored myself less than with colleagues. I could feed it half-baked ideas and iterate until a germ became a fully formed thought. I began to see AI as a thought partner — a perspective crystallized for me by Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence. Mollick argues that AI is not just a tool to be managed but a collaborator to be engaged — an unpredictable partner that works best when you bring curiosity, iteration, and skepticism. That resonated with me. The more I treated AI as a sounding board rather than a vending machine, the more valuable it became. It didn’t hand me answers so much as it helped refine my thinking, nudging me toward better questions and unexpected perspectives.

AI was also there when I had no one else to turn to for advice. Rather than disappearing down a Reddit rabbit hole, I could ask it directly. I workshopped difficult conversations, tested the tone of tricky emails, even asked for parenting advice. As an introvert, I often struggle to model other people — who my audience is, what they’re thinking. AI helped me build and test those models. It could also fast-track personal research: I’d tell it my preferences, concerns, and constraints, and it would provide tailored suggestions — from vacation itineraries to meeting agendas. To my surprise, it was often a pretty good coach.

Of course, there are risks. AI thought every idea I had was brilliant. Unfortunately, so did I. I learned to ask it to be more critical. It also fabricated facts, so I began requesting citations. Some of my best prompts became: offer counterarguments, suggest a reading list. And it is notoriously bad at math. For decisions involving costs and benefits, it was good at listing factors but unreliable at adding them up.

Still, AI fueled my intellectual curiosity in ways I hadn’t felt since college. I found myself engaging with ideas, writing, and questioning with a renewed enthusiasm. Yet while I loved talking about AI in the abstract, I was hesitant to discuss my own use. It felt a little like cheating.

AI and the Author

Beyond legal and ethical concerns, there is something off-putting about AI-generated content. It often falls into the uncanny valley — blithe, unempathetic, too clever by half. I remember reading the infamous “Fork in the Road” email from DOGE and recognizing the AI polish. Now I know the tells: the em dashes, the emoji bullets, the formulaic call to action. Much of what it produces feels like inauthentic pap.

All of this brings me back to authenticity. At what point is my work no longer mine? Is AI fundamentally different from spellcheck, from Google, or from asking a colleague to review a draft?

As Walter Benjamin argued in the 1930s, mechanical reproduction stripped art of its “aura”: the unrepeatable presence of the original tied to time, place, and human effort. Benjamin’s insight was just the beginning. Postmodern theorists pushed the logic further. For them, the idea of an “original” author or artwork was a myth. Culture was an endless hall of mirrors — copies without originals, dead styles endlessly recycled. Fredric Jameson called this pastiche: “blank parody,” recycling without critique.

Artists like Andy Warhol and Sol LeWitt didn’t resist this logic — they embraced it. Warhol outsourced much of his work to silkscreen, turning mass production itself into art. LeWitt argued that the idea mattered more than execution: “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

As an aside, one of my lasting memories of my father, Al, is from a trip we took to Pittsburgh for my niece’s graduation, about a year before he died. With his mobility limited, he knew he couldn’t endure the long ceremony, so I took him instead to the Andy Warhol Museum downtown. My brother, fresh from California, had been extolling the virtues of microdosing and had slipped me some wares. Impulsively, I sampled microdose after microdose until the pattern on my father’s button-down started to swirl, at which point I realized that my microdose had become something closer to a macrodose. So there I was, tripping on mushrooms, wheeling my father past rows of soup cans, Elvises, and Marilyns — in one of the most wonderful museum dates of my life.

If previous technologies of reproduction were small steps towards a postmodern conception of artistic agency, AI is a giant leap. In a sense, generative AI productions are simulacra, as defined by Baudrillard, a copy without an explicit original. The original reference is no longer a singular artwork but rather a statistical synthesis distilled from a collective memory of art.

At its worst, AI accelerates commercial trends of appropriation and aggregation that have debased and diluted art. We risk drowning in a flood of derivative aura-less art, what Frederic Jameson describes as pastiche, “blank parody” recycling dead styles without critique. Barthes famously concluded, “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.” You can feel this acutely in Hollywood’s endless superhero sequels, as the actors bemoan the lack of original scripts, in the algorithm’s preference for what already works, in the risk-averse polish of professional writing. AI threatens to accelerate the trend. It doesn’t invent so much as recombine, spitting out fluent pablum at industrial scale.

At its best it continues the trend that Benjamin first noted of democratizing art, making not just the consumption of art but its creation more accessible. Still it’s hard to shake the conception that great art is born out of human courage, talent, and struggle. Warhol may have outsourced the reproduction of his art, but the style and originality was unmistakably his own. Warhol’s process stripped away the traditional aura of craft, but he replaced it with other forms: the aura of concept, personality, cultural mirroring, and irony. His genius was not in the silkscreen process itself, but in recognizing that in the age of reproduction, the aura could migrate — from the handmade to the conceptual, from the object to the persona, from the canvas to the culture.

For me, authenticity in an age of AI doesn’t mean rejecting the tool. AI can make me more prolific, more curious, even more daring — but it cannot tell me who I am.

The Cyborg’s Struggle

We are, in some sense, already cyborgs. We have always co-evolved with the technologies we invent; one could argue that process is what makes us human. The choice isn’t whether to keep the machine out, but whether to let it flatten us into pablum or deepen our humanity. What makes the writing mine is that the inspiration is mine, the experiences are mine, and the choices are mine.

I don’t think any of us want to live in a world of AI slop, where human creative agency is siphoned off by machines owned by corporations. But we are not bound to that fate. It’s up to us to explore how these tools might help us build a more humane, more creative world. Every new technology is a mirror, and AI may be the most polished one yet. It reflects our brilliance and our blindspots, our hunger for shortcuts and our longing for meaning.

Authenticity isn’t something AI can hand us — it’s a practice we have to choose. We can let these tools flatten us into thinner, faster versions of ourselves, or we can use them to ask better questions, surface hidden ideas, and reconnect with curiosity. The real danger isn’t that AI will replace us, but that we will stop caring enough to notice the difference. For art to transcend simulacra and retain its aura it still requires the artist’s presence and struggle. Something real must be at stake.

Just as with those reels — the sharks circling, the skiers outracing avalanches — it’s the risk that gives life its intensity. To make art is expose part of yourself—your vision, your voice, your inner world—to questioning. Without the possibility of falling, there’s no thrill in standing on the ledge. Without the risk of failure, there is no truth in art.