The march of artificial intelligence appears to sound the death knell for writers. It seems inevitable that all literary writing will one day be outsourced to AI, with humans merely playing the roles of prompters and editors. Until that point, some imagine it sustainable to be AI-assisted while producing works that are still defensibly independent. We writers, to be sure, have experienced the “death of the author” before. It is a phrase made famous by the mid-20th century thinker Roland Barthes and describes how the final authority for meaning in a work shifts from the writer to the reader. So…