Ethical Authorship in the Age of Generative AI: A Digital Humanist Framework for Scholarly Accountability

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics Shiraz University Eram Square, Shiraz University Shiraz, Iran

2 Macquarie University Sydney, Australia

Abstract

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into scholarly publishing has precipitated a philosophical crisis in authorship, agency, and moral responsibility. While a pragmatic consensus holds that AI cannot be an author (Thorp, 2023; Nature Portfolio, 2023), this prohibition remains philosophically under-justified, and no constructive normative framework for human–AI authorship has been offered. This paper examines how traditional humanism, posthumanist distributed agency, and reactive policy pragmatism fail to address the ethical and epistemic challenges of human–AI collaboration. Through philosophical analysis, it investigates whether scholarly authorship can be reconceived to preserve human moral agency and epistemic trust. Engaging with philosophy of technology debates on mediation and moral agency, we argue that digital humanism offers a necessary normative recalibration. This framework re-conceptualizes authorship not as the sole origin of text but as a non-delegable ethical practice of custodial responsibility, where human scholars retain ultimate accountability for AI-augmented work. The paper's principal result is twofold: a philosophical grounding for the authorship prohibition, and custodial authorship as an operational ethical model. We propose that scholarly publishing adopt proactive, value-driven policies enforcing transparency and human oversight.

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Journal of Philosophical Theological Research

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 24 September 2026

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