A peer-reviewed essay in *Humanities* (MDPI, 2025) argues that AI-generated literature isn't simply a new writing tool — it's a new media form, and the distinction turns on one structural fact: the medium is now performing authorship rather than conveying it. In traditional literary production, author, medium, and audience occupy separate roles. AI collapses that triad. The text arrives already narrated, already voiced, with no originating self behind it — what looks like expression is, the essay argues, performance all the way down.

That reframing has consequences beyond literary theory. If AI authorship is performance rather than production, then questions of credit, originality, and creative ownership aren't just legally unsettled — they're categorically misframed by the tools we currently use to answer them.