ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND LITERARY AUTHORSHIP: AN EMPIRICAL AND THEORETICAL INVESTIGATION OF CREATIVITY, INTERPRETATION, AND READER PERCEPTIONS
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND LITERARY AUTHORSHIP: AN EMPIRICAL AND THEORETICAL INVESTIGATION OF CREATIVITY, INTERPRETATION, AND READER PERCEPTIONS

Summary/Abstract: The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in literary production has intensified scholarly debates concerning authorship, creativity, originality, and interpretive authority. While considerable attention has been devoted to AI-generated fiction and poetry, comparatively little empirical research has examined AI-generated literary criticism and how readers evaluate it relative to human-authored criticism. This study investigates the implications of AI-assisted literary criticism by integrating poststructuralist authorship theory with quantitative reader-response analysis. A mixed-method research design was adopted, combining comparative textual case analysis with a survey of 120 participants, including literary scholars, postgraduate students, writers, editors, publishers, and literary critics. Two comparable literary critical essays one generated using ChatGPT (OpenAI GPT-4o) and the other written by an experienced literary scholar were evaluated using a structured questionnaire measuring coherence, originality, interpretive depth, credibility, and overall quality. The data were analyzed using SPSS through descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, and independent-samples t-tests. The findings reveal no statistically significant difference in perceived coherence between the two essays. However, human-authored criticism received significantly higher ratings for originality, interpretive depth, and credibility. Qualitative feedback similarly characterized the AI-generated essay as technically competent but comparatively less insightful and less conceptually innovative. Drawing upon poststructuralist theory, digital humanities, and distributed cognition, the study argues that AI does not replace the human author or literary critic but reconfigures authorship into a collaborative process involving human intention, computational systems, and editorial mediation.

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