12 Sep AI, Authorship & Discomfort

AI-generated content has entered public life quickly, raising questions about creativity, authenticity, and ethics. What is striking is that AI-generated writing often meets with more suspicion than AI-generated images or music. To see why, we need to look at history, culture, and recent empirical studies. Western traditions of authorship and originality carry heavy weight, and these traditions shape how we judge written, visual, and musical media differently when machines create them.

Authorship and Originality in Western Culture

In the West, writing has long been tied to the figure of the author. This was not always the case. In earlier periods – ancient, medieval – many works (folktales, poetry, scriptures) were transmitted without a clear individual author. Only through the rise of printing, copyright law (16th-18th centuries), and Enlightenment ideas did the idea of singular authorship become central. Modern readers expect writing to express an individual mind, with originality and personal insight.

Writing vs. Images: Different Traditions

Visual media have undergone mechanical reproduction (e.g. photography in the 19th century), tools, remixing, and appropriation for a long time. These traditions made us more tolerant to technological mediation in images. By contrast, in writing, plagiarism is heavily condemned; originality of phrasing and voice are central. That difference helps explain why AI writing triggers more discomfort.

Empirical Evidence: Imagery vs. Perception

• A recent study by Velásquez-Salamanca (2025) found that human-made images are perceived as both more realistic and more credible than AI-generated images.
• Another study (“Deciphering authenticity in the age of AI” by Farooq et al., 2025) showed that when AI-generated images are more realistic in appearance, people are more likely to accept them as authentic—but still with less confidence. Emotional salience did not always contribute significantly to the judgement of authenticity.

These findings help show that people’s unease with AI in images exists, but it is more forgiving when the image is high quality and believable.

The Rise of AI Writing

When large language models appeared (e.g. ChatGPT), many reacted with alarm. An AI can now produce essays, poems, or articles that sound human. This raises fears: what does it mean for writing if the voice behind it might be machine, not human?

People often describe a strange hollowness when they discover text they liked is AI-written. The promise of another mind behind words collapses. In branding or emotionally charged messages, consumer studies find that AI-written emotional content is trusted less and seen as less authentic. For example, a study by Kirk & Givi (2024) found that consumers respond less favourably to heartfelt messages once they believe an AI wrote them.

Music as Comparative Case

The recent case of The Velvet Sundown, a band that accrued over one million Spotify streams before being revealed to be entirely AI generated (music, backstory, visuals) offers a concrete example. Industry insiders called for warning labels and transparency, arguing that listeners should know whether music is made with human involvement.

This case highlights how music, though mediated by technology, still carries strong expectations of authorial voice, emotional authenticity, and human identity.

Cultural Differences Beyond the West

We must also consider how other traditions treat authorship and originality differently:

• In East Asia, imitation and mastering earlier forms are valued; creative variation within tradition is admired.
• In South Asia, improvisation and lineage in music and poetry make authorship shared and ongoing.
• African oral traditions often see storytelling as communal; the identity of the teller might matter less than the function of the story.
• Indigenous cultures of Americas and Oceania frequently tie voice, song, and story to collective memory, land, or ritual rather than individual ownership.

These traditions suggest that discomfort with AI writing may be especially acute because of Western cultural assumptions. In other cultures where authorship is more fluid, AI’s role might be interpreted differently.

Conclusion: Authorship, Authenticity, and the Future of Creativity

Western tradition has long treated writing as the domain of individual creative thought: the idea that one voice produces text, carries originality, and can be praised or held responsible. Visual art and music have histories of technological mediation, collaboration, and tradition, making them somewhat more ready to absorb AI’s role—though not without questions and ethical challenges.

The Velvet Sundown case shows that in music, as in writing, authenticity and disclosure matter. People expect more than technical quality—they expect voice, identity, integrity. Writing provokes the strongest unease because it is most tightly bound with assumptions of presence of a thinking, feeling author. Images are tolerated with machine assistance; music is contested; writing is the art form where the absence of human voice most deeply unsettles.

 

References

• Velásquez-Salamanca, D. (2025). Interpretation of AI-Generated vs. Human-Made Images. PMC.
• Farooq, A., et al. (2025). Deciphering authenticity in the age of AI: how AI-generated images are judged when realistic. Springer. 
• Kirk, & Givi, J. (2024). Are messages from robots trustworthy? Study on consumers’ reactions to emotionally charged AI messages.
• The Guardian. (2025, July 14). An AI-generated band got 1m plays on Spotify. Now music insiders say listeners should be warned. 
• People Magazine. (2025). Rock Band with More Than 1 Million Monthly Spotify Listeners Reveals Itself as AI Project.