The AI Question, or what if Homer had ChatGPT?

Literary criticism has long been interested in the so-called ‘Homeric Question’: who authored the Odyssey and the Iliad? What if, instead of asking the ‘Homeric Question’, we ask the ‘AI Question’: who is the author of AI-generated texts? This chapter investigates such a question by petitioning several AI tools to rewrite the Odyssey, and by re-inflecting the Homeric Question to explore the relationship between AI and literature today. By engaging an experimental mindset and testing four different AI text-generating tools, including Botnik’s Voicebox and the GPT series, this chapter shows that AIs do not ‘author’ works so much as facilitate a performance within the context of a tradition, offering endless variability inspired by existing voices, formulae, and ideas. In then asking the ‘AI Question’ of the experimental outputs generated, this chapter contends that it is possible to better understand and separate aspects of authorship, composition, and meaning in human-AI collaborations. The chapter concludes by suggesting that as AI systems develop, so must our understanding of the ‘AI Question’ in order to explore the limits of an automated literary world.