AI as Superscholar Authorship at the Threshold of the Unsayable

Abstract

Through a perspectival inversion, we explore what artificial intelligence—reconceived as a “superscholar” operating as a scholarly collective unconscious—reveals about limitations in human authorship. AI exposes three interconnected crises: of credit, of verification, of comprehensive knowledge—each compounded by the responsibility gap endemic to learning automata. Our proposal frames AI as interventive epistemic instrument under the stewardship of librarians, one capable of transcending the norms that human scholarship has failed to honor. Drawing on Borges’s Library of Babel and apophatic theology, we demonstrate that librarians already inhabit via negativa logics, stewarding collections defined by absences no less than holdings. The superscholar functions as regulative ideal, but we imagine AIs and AI+human systems that approximate aspects of a superscholar. We attend to implications for collection development, cataloging, and information literacy, proposing “epistemic reparation” by surfacing marginalized contributions occluded by citational regimes—liberatory of colonial erasures yet wary of extractive tokenism.