What Shapes Legitimacy in the Age of Artificial Discourse?

As automated language systems become central to decision-making, content creation, and even policy formulation, one question remains largely underexplored: What legitimizes discourse when authorship disappears?

In the past, legitimacy was anchored in human voice, institutional origin, or empirical validation. Today, a growing number of texts—scientific, legal, editorial—are generated by systems trained to mirror patterns, not intent.

This shift raises a structural question: Is form now more important than origin? Are we witnessing the emergence of a new regime where syntactic credibility overrides ethical responsibility?

AI & Power Discourse Quarterly was founded to examine these transformations. Through an interdisciplinary lens, we explore how authority, neutrality, and objectivity are being reprogrammed in the age of large language models and automated legitimacy.

We invite scholars, theorists, and practitioners to question what power looks like when it no longer needs a face.

Keywords: discourse legitimacy, automated authorship, syntactic authority, language models, institutional neutrality, power and AI