the iconoclast's descending

  The Red Herring of “AI Plagiarism” and the Metaphysical Confusion of Machine Authorship: Style over Substance Douglas Blake Olds May 20, 2026 [1] Abstract This essay develops a metaphysics of authorship grounded in lived duration, embodiment, recollection, conative judgment, corrigibility, and responsibility, joining it to a political economy of archival enclosure and downstream suspicion. Against both permissive claims that AI is only a tool and prohibitionist claims that any AI assistance nullifies authorship, it distinguishes ministerial editorial technics from sovereign or agentic systems by asking what kind of bearer can truthfully receive the predicates of authorship, recollection, judgment, and responsibility.  Working in the space of authorship studies with Foucault, Barthes, Benjamin, Illich, Hyde, Lessig, Stiegler, and Derrida, this essay restores authorship to the continuous living bearer capable of provenance, correction, and accountable witness. It argues th...