Artificial Intelligence and the Crisis of Authorship: A Study of Human Creativity in the Light of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Abstract

The rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence has reopened an old literary and philosophical question: what does it mean to create? In the contemporary world, AI-generated poems, stories, essays, and images have challenged the traditional idea of authorship, originality, imagination, and human artistic ownership. This paper examines the crisis of authorship in the age of Artificial Intelligence through the lens of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Although Shelley’s novel was published in the nineteenth century, it remains deeply relevant to modern technological anxieties because it presents the story of a creator who produces life through scientific ambition but fails to accept moral responsibility for his creation. Victor Frankenstein’s creature may be read as an early symbolic figure of artificial creation: made by human intelligence, shaped through technical process, yet capable of disturbing the boundary between creator and created.