AN EPISTEMIC VIRTUE-THEORETIC SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF AI AUTHORSHIP

Resumen

Luciano Floridi’s concept of distant writing, which is the textual production mediated by generative AI, has presented us with a challenge to traditional accounts of authorship and epistemic agency. In this paper, we analyze the epistemological consequences of this new paradigm. Our argument is that while distant writing seems to reduce the author’s role, it reframes it, shifting the locus of epistemic competence from direct textual composition to the second-order acts of goal setting, prompting, and curation. By comparing this phenomenon to Ernest Sosa’s virtue-theoretic account of epistemic agency, we develop an epistemology of authorship for the AI era. According to the view we advocate, the Apt Curation Model, the human author remains the central epistemic agent, not as the originator of sentences, but as the virtuous curator whose skill makes the final text an apt epistemic performance. I conclude by considering and rebutting the objection that the opacity of AI models reduces authorial success to mere epistemic luck.

Keywords: Generative AI. Authorship. Virtue epistemology. Epistemic Agency, Luciano Floridi. Epistemic Responsibility.