Why does putting your name on it have to imply you wrote every word, and not instead, just attach your reputation to it, and say that you stand behind the words that are in it, regardless of who/what wrote the words? If we look at things that way, we can continue as we always have evaluating the content, pedagogy, etc. and associate good and bad content, pedagogy, etc with the author and know that when we see that author's name we'll know what we should expect (regardless of who wrote the individual words).

I'm imagining something more like the way we treat movie directors. When I see Michael Bay vs. Quentin Tarantino, I don't think that those people wrote the film, or set up every camera shot in minute detail, or designed the costumes, etc. but I know that they had a hand in arranging for all of that and it will all ultimately come through with their unique stamp on it.

You're proposing a new way that we could treat authorship that's different from how we currently treat authorship. There's an argument to be had about whether that would be better than our current system. My vote would be no, but I'm not claiming it's obvious one way or the other.

But regardless of whether you think your new system would be better, it's not the current system. Surely the question of whether someone is lying by putting their name on a book they didn't write can't depend on some hypothetical future change to the meaning of authorship that hasn't happened yet.

What do you mean "the" or "our" current system? That's entirely your interpretation, and we've always had a sliding scale of "non-authorship" from editors to ghostwriters. AI models are the same; you can use them in a heavily directed way (basically, as an editor, or in an outsourcing capacity for e.g. illustrations), or in a hands off way that you just endorse.

> Maybe someday we'll live in a world where sticking a person's name at the top of a book doesn't carry the implication that they wrote the words in the book.

Not even an AI thing, we don't. Ghost writing has been going on for centuries.

I don't like that! I agree it's dishonest and I wish we lived in a world where having been exposed employing a ghostwriter is a disgrace no public figure can come back from. I don't like that AI has made it worse, either. At least with ghost writing there are some contexts (politicians, celebrity bios) where you might suspect it, but in most you won't.

But, we do live in that world right now.

Yeah, I'm also not a big fan of ghostwriting in the domains where it's prevalent. For what it's worth, though, academic writing is very much not one of those domains: taking LLM's out of it, if ten years ago it had turned out that the "author" of a math textbook like this one had paid someone else to write the whole book for them, that would be considered major academic misconduct and that person's reputation would have been pretty severely damaged. I do think it makes sense to take the norms of a particular subset of the publishing world into account when thinking about what a reasonable reader expects when they see someone's name on a book.