Authorship as a Distinct Ethical Dimension in Speech BCIs

Recent advances in speech brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), including the use of AI language models to generate linguistic outputs from brain signals, offer important possibilities for people with severe motor impairments. At the same time, the computational mediation of language production raises distinctive ethical challenges. Previous work has argued that the assessment and development of speech BCIs should aim to preserve users’ ownership of their linguistic outputs. In this paper, we argue that authorship constitutes a further and distinct ethical dimension. We characterize authorship in terms of two related conditions: the user’s communicative intention must play an appropriate causal role in producing the linguistic output, and the output must sufficiently reflect the semantic content of that intention. Drawing on a relational conception of authorship, we argue that this causal role is compatible with the substantial social, linguistic, and technological mediation involved in speech production. We further defend a workable notion of semantic accuracy grounded in contemporary models of language production. Crucially, we argue that preserving authorship is ethically valuable because it supports users’ ability to shape their communicative lives and enables broader goods associated with creativity, expressive diversity, and human flourishing.