The relationship
Symbiotic Authorship describes literary work in which a human author remains responsible for the work while interaction with artificial intelligence materially shapes its development.
That material role may arise through dialogue, criticism, drafting, revision, structural exploration, translation, comparison, experimentation or another form of creative interaction.
We do not count AI words.
A conversation may alter the structure of a novel without leaving a single machine-written sentence in the final text. An AI-generated passage may remain while the human author continues to make the larger creative decisions. A rejected suggestion can matter if rejecting it materially redirects the work.
Creative causation is not the same thing as textual provenance.
Trust before surveillance
MIELOGOS begins with the entrant’s good-faith declaration. In unusual cases where a genuine eligibility question cannot otherwise be resolved, the Prize may ask a proportionate clarifying question or request limited corroboration.
Complete prompt archives, complete AI conversations and total creative histories are not ordinary submission material.
The useful question
Do not ask: “Am I AI enough?”
Did the human–AI relationship materially shape the work that came into being?