Human-AI Collaborative Authorship in Public Discourse: A Three-Level Framework for AI-Assisted Communication

SI-WP-006: Human-AI Collaborative Authorship in Public Discourse: A Three-Level Framework for AI-Assisted Communication This paper reframes the relationship between human communicators and AI systems in public discourse. A familiar model treats AI as a linguistic instrument, a sophisticated tool that helps humans express pre-formed ideas more clearly. That model is incomplete, and this paper hypothesizes that its incompleteness generates misplaced guilt and conceptual confusion about the authenticity of AI-assisted communication. The prevalence of such guilt and confusion is an empirical question this paper does not settle. The paper proposes a three-level architecture of human-AI collaborative authorship: linguistic realization, meaning negotiation, and conceptual co-production. Across all three levels the human retains the Authority Function, evaluating, approving, redirecting, and integrating what the AI produces. This Authority Function, rather than the origin of any individual phrase or candidate idea, is what makes the resulting communication authentically human and responsibly attributable. Authenticity in communication, as the term is used here, is not a property of production method. It is a claim about the functions authenticity norms serve: assigning accountability, calibrating trust, and preventing deceptive attribution, not about credit and desert, which origination continues to govern. This paper is a companion to SI-WP-002 (The Orchestrator Role in Human-AI Evolution). Together they define the human relational function at two complementary levels: SI-WP-002 at the level of knowledge production across distributed AI instances, and this paper at the level of individual communicative acts. The theoretical architecture connecting them is the Human Orchestration Principle, stated in SI-WP-002 Section 13. This paper publishes as part of a coordinated five-paper deposit with SF0009, SM-012, SM-004, and SI-WP-002. Document ID: SI-WP-006 Version: 4.5.3 Author: Thomas W. Gantz Affiliation: Synthience Institute License: CC-BY 4.0 v4.5.3 Added Concept DOIs for the other Synthience Institute papers cited in this paper For published work and Institute information: synthience.org