In the mirror: rewriting of the self. The interaction between autobiographical practice and generative artificial intelligence.

Authors: Donatella Azzollini, Michele Baldassarre

The spread of generative artificial intelligence systems opens new questions also within the field of autobiographical practices. Writing about oneself, traditionally understood as a space for reflection, distancing, and attribution of meaning to lived experience, today encounters tools capable of intervening on the text, modifying its tone, amplifying some of its aspects and proposing different narrative perspectives. The possibility of receiving a reworked version of one’s own account introduces a further element into the autobiographical process: the subject no longer confronts only what he or she has written, but also a variant of his or her own text that appears to him or her, at the same time, familiar and foreign. The present contribution examines this space of tension. Attention is directed rather to the reactions that such rewriting may arouse, algorithmic rewriting therefore appears as a mediating device.