Who wrote this?? And who is an author, anyway? AI authors in the catalog

Abstract

Over the last decade or so, generative processes have increasingly captured public attention, from the fever dream images of early neural nets to the more recent proliferation of chatbots and language models. A 2021 post on the PCCLIST cataloging listserv about a book "co-authored" by a transformer language model led to an almost week-long discussion over whether the AI was truly an author or just a tool. In the intervening years, AI-created books have proliferated on online bookselling and book rating platforms, and sometimes even library collections. Just as reference and instruction librarians have risen to the challenge of teaching about LLMs and chatbots, catalogers should be prepared to encounter and describe resources created by computational processes. This lightning talk will quickly review the history and current state of computer-generated texts, and touch on the evolution of the concept of authorship in cataloging standards. It will then bring these historical threads together to consider how catalogers can represent how computer-generated texts with current cataloging tools and standards, and speculate on some alternative options for the future.