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Are LLMs themselves authors?

Establish whether large language models can be considered authors in academic contexts and, if so, specify the conditions or criteria under which such authorial status would be warranted.

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Background

Throughout the paper, the authors focus primarily on whether human users of LLMs can count as authors while setting aside the separate question of LLMs’ own authorial status. They discuss internalist and externalist criteria for authorship and note pragmatic reasons that might support crediting LLMs, but they do not resolve the issue.

They explicitly state that philosophical questions about the authorial status of LLMs remain, indicating that the field lacks a settled account of whether, and under what criteria, LLMs could be authors.

References

While the present paper has focused on the authorial status of LLM users in research contexts, there remain philosophical questions about the authorial status of LLMs and the ethics of using them, as well as policy questions about how LLM use should be disclosed and how credit should be allocated for works thereby produced.

— Authorship Without Writing: Large Language Models and the Senior Author Analogy (2509.05390 - Hurshman et al., 5 Sep 2025) in Section V (Conclusion)