> Uh, Steven Spielberg is all over E.T. For one thing, he storyboarded the big special effects sequences. He collaborated closely on the screenplay because it was drawn from his own childhood experiences. He was the final say in casting. His relationship with editor Michael Kahn is famously collaborative.

That's all meta. Trivia. Decisions he made or feedback he gave, that while influencing the final product cannot be observed in the final product (e.g. show me the actual Spielberg-drawn storyboard in the film; It doesn't exist, because the storyboard turned into a sequence of shots made by the cinematographer, instructing the camerawoman to point the camera at the actors lit by the gaffers, or into a work breakdown strucutre then followed by the SFX team painstakingly drawing it frame by frame). No one but Spielberg could say "That part was me, this part was Kahn's." I can't find any of that out just by watching the movie. When I engage with a piece of media, I presume the author is dead. What is in the media is canon, and what's not in it isn't. The behind the scenes, or the director's biography, or the interviews aren't part of the art. Art shouldn't rely on "Oh it's good, or even better than you thought it was once you know this cool fact or that wild story from production."

Star Wars isn't good only because George Lucas was a genius, or because they spent a lot of time on the models and tried a cool new text intro sequence, or because of any of the other novel effects. Lots of movies spend a lot of time in production, with a lot of experts and a lot of novel ideas, and still fail. Star Wars is good because the finished movie is good. We credit Star Wars generally as being George Lucas' brainchild, but if you know the backstory, it's only good because he had good editors to reign him in. But that's meta. Nobody knew that in 1977. They just knew they enjoyed the movie and it said "written and directed by George Lucas."

When I watch the movie I don't see the storyboard, or the redlines in the screenplay, or the casting notes, or the conversations and discussions with Kahn. All I know from the movie is the credits, and the credits don't say "Written by Melissa Mathison (with close collaboration by Spielberg based on his childhood experience)". Those are, from a lay viewer's POV, 'facts not in evidence.'

E.T. was a single example. I'm comfortable claiming my argument applies to all directors of all films, and all forms of art that are created by more than one person. Another example: "Over The Edge" and "Off The Wall", two books about deaths in US national parks. They each have two authors. Only one author co-wrote both of them. To whom do I credit my love for those books? Only to Ghiglieri, since I can see the consistent tone between them? That would be unfair to Myers and Farabee. Only to Myers and Farabee, because they're the park rangers that witnessed a number of the emergencies and deaths? That would be unfair to Ghiglieri. What about the editors, who surely worked hard to make books that are basically a list of stories about death interesting as a cohesive narrative. My only option is to credit all the authors, and everyone else involved, equally, and not try to break down paragraphs between "this author wrote this one, and that author wrote that one." They didn't distinguish, so I can't either. [1]

I'm all over my essay. I drafted and organized the original outline. I've made substantial changes to the order of paragraphs and what and how the arguments are built and developed based on my personal experiences. I am the final say for whose quotes are included and which ones are cut. My relationship with myself is famously collaborative (famous among my family and friends).

None of that matters to the reader. Whether I wrote it myself or with a friend, or used a ghostwriter, or used an LLM, the audience is going to credit or blame it on the name at the top. My papers in college weren't graded based on whether I spent 300 hours on them and revised them 20 times, or whether it was I or my classmate who coined that pithy line I then used throughout, or because I used niche knowledge about the subject I knew before taking the class. That's trivia. They were graded on the final single copy I submitted. I got once chance.

The only difference between an essay of mine being written by a ghostwriter I hired and an LLM is that the LLM output is always going to sound like an LLM. They are identical in that neither of them are "me". The ghostwriter will sound either like the ghostwriter or like the ghostwriter trying to write like me. But whether I hired a ghostwriter and published their work under my name, or if I used an LLM and the audience didn't notice, at the end of the day they'll credit or blame me entirely, because my name is at the top, no different as if I'd written the entire thing from scratch. I have no excuses except for the final product.

For this essay specifically, If I ever did release it or publish it, it would be under my real name. Firstly because I've never liked being "anonymous" online (I feel I never act or write like myself unless I'm speaking under my own name; opposite of most in my experience), and second because I would want the reader to know that there's a human they can credit or blame for it. I guess for me that's the tradeoff. When anonymous I won't use LLMs, because my ethos comes from being (and sounding) like a human being who merely doesn't want to share their name. Under my real name, however, I feel more comfortable saying "directed and edited by [real name], drafted by [llm]," because then the reader can decide if the ethos associated with my real name and affilations is strong enough to justify reading a logos and pathos that the human freely admits is not entirely from their own fleshy brain.

[1] They do, actually, at times. When one of the authors was directly involved in one of the stories and is recounting their personal experience, they will write "I (Myers)..." or "I (Farabee).." Aside from that they do not say who wrote what, or who influenced who.