The Apt Curation Model: An Epistemic Virtue Theory of AI-Assisted Authorship

Luciano Floridi’s concept of distant writing – which is the textual production mediated by generative AI – has presented us with a challenge to traditional accounts of authorship and epistemic agency. In this paper, we analyze the epistemological consequences of this new paradigm, arguing that distant writing reframes rather than diminishes the author’s role, shifting epistemic competence from direct composition to second-order curatorial acts: architectural design, dialogical refinement, evaluative verification, and integrative synthesis. Applying Ernest Sosa’s virtue epistemology, we develop the Apt Curation Model, which positions the human author as the central epistemic agent, not as sentence originator, but as virtuous curator whose competence makes the text an apt epistemic performance. We rebut the opacity objection that AI’s inscrutability reduces authorship to epistemic luck, demonstrating through Floridi’s Levels of Abstraction that curatorial virtues constitute responsible engagement. We conclude by examining domain specificity and identifying implications for pedagogy and intellectual property law.