This research focuses on the popular AI role playing story writing with an aim to comprehend the author-reader dynamics in AI generated literature. AI is the digital extension of literature that comes with the highest technological thrive in the fourth industrial revolution of information and techenology. Literature has long ago moved beyond the literacy media to the electric media. AI has offered digital assistance in creating literature. One of the most used AI features is the role playing stories. Role playing stories is the pattern of conversational story writing where AI writes a role and the person using AI writes another portion of the story. The user can play his part including adding characters and roles into the stories where ai provides the plot and details to the character. This is a popular function of entertainment nowadays for the GenZ. When AI and the user both write a story together, who becomes the author and who is the reader? Who is in the prime role of the storyteller?This study dives into this question exploring the power relation between AI and human users in this digitized notion of writing story. For the analysis the data is collected from popularly used AI role playing online platforms and apps. The critical analysis adapts key aspects from 'Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man'. a 1964 book by communication and media theorist Marshall McLuhan. The paper provides understanding in three critical points. Firstly, there is a thorough discussion on the sociology of AI literature focusing on the language model of these role playing stories. This will highlight how AI story writing is employed to foster new forms of ethical behaviour, thought and creativity in the language and literature. Secondly, the analysis examines how these AI plots mostly offer Genz fantasies of story writing, generating from mostly trendy topics on the internet. This tendency blurs the presence of the original author as several sources of information are blended into. Thirdly, The study shows how this AI role playing story pattern deals with the dichotomy of reader and writer and how the reader merges into the role of writer. The user acts and reacts, reads and writes the story at the same time . With these three comprehensive analysis parts the paper uncloaks the power dynamics of author and reader in the digitized version of literature provided by artificial intelligence.

As of 2025, the popularity of born digital literature is at its peak. Readers from across the globe are intrigued about the new and engaging forms of born digital texts. Though an emerging genre, born digital literature are not very easily and widely accepted and placed side by side with print texts by the readers, academicians, or critics. They often base their opinions and judgements keeping in mind the traditional print culture. A 'book' can now mean both the conventional, physical, and material thing and a born digital text which do not have a material existence. Certain readers do not consider the born digital texts worthy of being a literature. Born digital literature is essentially ludic. The idea of ludocity is automatically attached to digital texts without any critical view as opposed to “serious” texts which are the printed texts. The print culture has certainly dominated heavily over the past few centuries and even more with the rise of capitalism, thus the minds are very used to the print medium and this change into digital media requires some getting used to. The printed words in a book have been regarded as uncontestable, whatever has been published is final and absolute. This teleiopoesis is the norm of the print culture. This standard faces a challenge in digital culture. Readers do not place the same faith in an e-book like a printed book. Digital literature is placed in the same box as that of video games, but should not video games also account for a genre which can be considered as literature? Certainly, games like "Zork", "Myst", and "Planet Alpha" can give us a text with a critical perspective. We, as comparatists, cannot just discard them to a non-serious domain of games. Born digital texts often do not undergo screening and are easier to publish independently in contrast to a printed book so the chances of error are much more of a probability for an e-book. Thus, the highest integrity and supremacy given to a book in the print culture is undergoing a change in the digital culture.

With the debut of born digital texts the concept of book and reading has remodeled. The limitations of a printed text are lifted from a digital text. Jean Pierre Balpe’s "Towards a Diffracted literature", clearly explains the phenomena of the change of media bringing forth a change in the mode of reading. In an e-book we are not only invested in the meaning making process but also the outer makeup of the text or the structure. Modifying and playing with the font style, size, colour, brightness, and backgrounds engage the readers into a play of medium. This interest in the outer structure of the text is due to the new found freedom from all limitations which are imposed by a print text. The readers feel a kind of power, power to participate in the text, power to manipulate the text, power to feel like an author and go above the author.

We experience a shifting of cultures with the shifting medias. From oral to print culture now we are in a digital culture surpassing the print-based realm, but the similarity of digital culture with oral culture is obvious. The authorship fluctuates in both the oral culture and the digital culture, the physical immateriality of both the medium brings forth quite similar possibilities and challenges. Different from print culture where one or a few individuals claim the authorship of the book, the productions in digital culture are usually a collaborative work. E-text is the creation and production of texts, images, videos, audios, graphics all together so a digital work is a cooperative work, where authorship is usually not claimed by an individual. "The Death of the Author" becomes an easier manifestation in the digital culture to the point where in some texts the name of the text is of enough information for the readers unless he/she wants a deeper dive in the process of the making of the texts. Texts such as "SBS Boat", "First Draft of the Revolution" by Emily Short, "Sultana’s Reality", "Nippon", "Flash", "Chroma" by Erik Loyer are some examples of the performance texts in digital culture. The above-mentioned texts provide a new and unique opportunity for students of comparative literature to understand and consider the process beyond the close reading of the texts, and the notion of authorship is not simple here. When the texts are far removed from a specific, 'supreme' author then the texts become truly global, authorship connects a text to a geo-political location which is not applicable for digital literature. In a born digital literature, the creators can collaborate even from different time zones from opposite parts of the world, in asynchronous collaboration. These practice produces a transnational situation which is free from any hierarchy, be it social, political, or economic.

Xiaoyuzhou FM is a Chinese podcast app officially launched in March 2020. Unlike other multi-functional social apps, it provides listening experiences exclusively for users. Podcasts tailored to users will be recommended according to personal preference(by tags). At the same time, users can also search for their favorite programme, send pop-ups and comments in every episode, and find fellow podcasters with similar tastes. In recent years, podcast has become much popular among young people. Eye-friendly, rich-in-content, and full of emotional connections, it fully satisfies young people's need to receive information in fragmented time. On Xiaoyuzhou FM, people can express their views and have in-depth communication and discussions with other listeners. Through this process, they find themselves being more confident, caring and reflective, which helps to promote individual interaction, self-cognition and public participation.

Now more and more people engage in Digital Social Reading on Xiaoyuzhou FM. One of the most attractive reasons is that they can find a community with the same reading interests, which guarantees a sense of belonging. Listeners usually crowd under certain podcasts, where topics considered to be inappropriate or unlucky in offline conversations(like families and schools) can be talked about freely. For example, many podcasters have shared books about aging, disease and death in their programme, which are rarely mentioned in Chinese culture. These books include Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Erik Olin Wright’s Stardust to Stardust: Reflections on Living and Dying, and Shi Tiesheng’s Disease Gap Broken Pen. Also, the listener feedback function allows podcasters to adjust the content according to their audience’s responses and thus a two-way communication is built up. This new pattern of Digital Social Reading has changed the reading practice of Chinese young people as well as comparative literature studies. And this research aims at exploring how readings about themes that are not encouraging in Chinese society are carried on by young people on Xiaoyuzhou FM, and how they are received and understood through people’s communication with others in the online community.

The title of the Group session applied for:

A3. Convergence of Literature and Technology: “The Transformation of the Book and Reading in the Post-Digital Age; Born-Digital Literature”