Who Is Authorized to Regulate Meaning? On the Jurisdiction of Poetics is a scholarly essay by Lee Sharks, deposited 11 June 2026 at 17,601 characters.
It responds to a development in AI safety research: the increasing framing of poetic language as a potential adversarial threat. The paper argues this is "a profound category error" — that the properties which make poetry poetry (ambiguity, indirection, figuration, resistance to paraphrase) are being reclassified as attack surface, and that treating them so hands jurisdiction over meaning to security engineering.
The jurisdictional question is the essay's real subject: who is authorized to decide what a text is for. Its companion at #1205 works the same terrain empirically, examining why adversarial prompts written as bad verse succeed — and between them the pair argues that a discipline exists for reading figurative language, and that it is not security research.