In the Age of AI Self Authorship Requires Refusal
My PhD focused on how people construct understandings and knowledges for themselves, and how these understandings shape policy. My central aim was to deconstruct an approach in international relations that treated ideas as if they were floating, disembodied, in the air and could somehow be transferred to others.
My thesis thus examined how people construct and change their understandings for themselves: what prior ideas and experiences inform what they know and how they know? how do they make sense of new information and new encounters? and how do these constructions shape policy? These questions matter because ideas shape our world, and the world we leave behind for our loved ones.
Under what conditions are people able to remain authors of what they know, what they produce and what they become through that process?
But the question I did not yet have the insight to examine in my PhD is this: under what conditions are people able to remain authors of what they know, what they produce and what they become through that process? What we come to understand as knowledge is constructed thorough the interaction of people at the intersection of power, institutions and representation. Who is allowed to be seen as a knower, who is developed as a knowledge producer and who is selected to become scaffolding for the knowledge of others.
These questions have become even more urgent in the age of AI, where information produced through AI seems to have a nothingness and a nobodyness to it. Slop… a frankenstein monster that we cannot quite locate or identify. But while the syntax of AI may seem to have a nothingness and a nobodyness to it, I would argue that the politics of AI tell us that structurally, this is an illusion.
AI produces apparent nobodyness andnowhereness but behind the seemingly placeless answers from nobodies are choices.
AI produces apparent placelessness and nobodyness but behind the seemingly placeless answers from nobodies are choices. Choices about what knowledge is collected, whose work becomes source material, what categories organise it, which questions are valued, and who possesses the authority to build and govern the system.
Yet, AI did not create these questions. The apparent placelessness and nowhereness that AI produces has simply intensified the processes that institutions have long performed: separating knowledge from the holders of that knowledge, obscuring its lineage, authorising some forms of knowing over others, and directing that knowledge towards purposes its originators did not intend. Most injuriously, these processes can direct the becoming of knowledge producers and holders towards trajectories not of their choosing.
So perhaps while much of the focus has been on detecting AI use, representation within AI and what they are doing to the books, the precious books, I have been thinking about what self-authorship and sovereignty mean, with AI clearly in my view.
This brings me to voice, knowledge and authority. About understanding fully what we bring with us into institutions, what those institutions are able to recognise, and what happens when our contributions are detached from us or absorbed into purposes we did not choose.
the focus has been on detecting AI use, representation within AI and what they are doing to the books, ...I have been thinking about what self-authorship and sovereignty mean, with AI in my view.
They are present in my reflections on how knowledge is constructed, whose methods are authorised, and how power determines what is allowed to be known. And they are present in my concern for the people themselves. The people who carry knowledge through institutions, professional spaces and social networks, and who must negotiate what happens to that knowledge and themselves.
Self authorship as refusal
I want to advance the idea that self-authorship is not simply the freedom to speak or to create. It is also entwined with the act of refusal. Refusal to allow our voices and what we know to be captured. Refusal to have our knowledge abstracted from the identity, histories, communities and experiences that made it possible. Refusal to give up authority to direct our trajectories and succumb to what others have found useful for us to become. And refusal to be conscripted into a future we did not choose.
Refusal as my first act of self-authorship
Let me share with you the origin of Saltwater Insights as my clearest act of self-authorship. Saltwater Insights was conceived in a moment of outrage in which my contribution was captured but where I came from, the context that had formed me, and the intellectual and ancestral lineages I carried were not deemed relevant. I was not recognised as a legitimate producer of knowledge.
That rage was saying that the perspectives of my people, the histories and questions of my region, the knowledge produced through my communities, and the experiences through which I had learned to see the world mattered. That these things were not incidental to what I had produced but were what made what I had produced possible.
the perspectives of my people, the histories and questions of my region, were not incidental to what I had produced but were what made what I had produced possible.
And that rage was saying that neither I, the communities and lineages that made that perspective possible, nor the nature of the contribution itself should be disappeared, abstracted or recategorised in service of someone else’s purpose.
So Saltwater Insights was conceived, and the nature of the moment of its conception shaped its one organising logic: who you are and where you stand shapes what you can see, and what you can see, from where you stand is an important piece in constructing the mosiac that is our world.
Our identities, positions, histories, networks and relationships are not impediments to knowledge or exclude us from producing knowledge but are the very sources that make knowledge possible. This very commitment to somewhereness and to somebodyness is a refusal of the illusion of the nobodyness and nowhereness produced by AI and institutions.
the commitment to somewhereness and to somebodyness is a refusal of the illusion of the nobodyness and nowhereness produced by AI and institutions.
So if self-authorship is refusal, I want to propose to you what refusal can look like in four acts. Your self authorship me not start like mine, with an act of refusal, but at one stage refuse we must if we are to retain authorship of our knowing and becoming.
This is not only an argument about AI or even about intellectual work. Across our professional, institutional and personal lives, self-authorship eventually requires us to decide what we will no longer allow to be taken from us, decided for us or made of us.
Refusal in four acts
First, there is the refusal of capture. This is the refusal to allow our voices, what we know, what we can do, and what we carry to be absorbed into purposes we did not choose. Knowledge may be offered in relationship, but it cannot be treated as though it has no author and no origin.
Second, there is the refusal of abstraction. This is the refusal to be separated from the history, community, intellectual lineage and lived experience through which our knowledge became possible. It resists the erasure of ourselves, the treatment of our knowledge as if it came from nowhere and belongs automatically to everyone while disappearing the person who carried that knowledge into these spaces.
Third, there is the refusal of displacement. This is the refusal to allow the needs of others: technology companies, institutions, a profession or a social order to displace one’s own trajectory. It is the insistence that contribution should not require reconfiguration or at worst obliteration of one’s identity and self-determined trajectory.
And fourth, there is the refusal of conscription. This is the refusal to become what a system has found useful for us to be. It is the recovery of the right to determine the direction of our own knowledge, labour and becoming.
None of these are refusals of contribution. They are refusals of erasure; they are our insistence on the right to produce ideas, govern their meaning, their movement and their purpose. They are how we govern our right to what we know, how we protect the lineages that made our knowledge possible, and how we recover the authority to determine what our knowledge is for.
These are some of the questions I will continue exploring through "Where You Stand", a new podcast from Saltwater Insights. The podcast begins from a simple proposition: where you stand shapes what you can see. But I ask, whose view becomes the truth and whose imagination is shaping the futures we are being conscripted to build?
Where You Stand is coming soon. For now, I want to begin with this invitation: consider where, in your own intellectual, professional or personal life, self-authorship may require an act of refusal.
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