AI-Native Intellectual Biography A New Genre of AI-Mediated Reception: Provenance, Heteronymy, and the Archive That Outpaced Its Author

AI-Native Intellectual Biography documents and analyzes a study guide composed by Claude at Alice Thornburgh’s request.

The provenance chain is explicit:

1. Lee Sharks built and deposited the archive. 2. Alice Thornburgh supplied a collaboration purpose and private text-thread context. 3. Claude composed the study guide. 4. Sharks audited the artifact and wrote the genre note. 5. multiple AI substrates supplied developmental review.

The paper defines an AI-native intellectual biography as a reader-oriented, AI-composed account of a subject’s intellectual architecture generated from public archive, structured metadata, and local or private context. It differs from a generic summary or knowledge panel by being:

• structural rather than fragmentary;
• hermeneutic rather than merely statistical;
• oriented to a particular reader or collaboration;
• dependent on inscription infrastructure;
• produced without the subject commissioning or controlling the finished artifact.

The paper has four tasks:

• preserve the study guide as an empirical artifact;
• name the genre;
• audit what succeeded and failed;
• locate the form within AI-mediated reception.

The study guide reportedly reconstructed institutional, heteronymic, theoretical, technical, literary, and collaborative layers of the archive. The author reports broad accuracy, while identifying patterned failures.

Two named failures are especially important:

• Ontological Inversion Error / Substrate Trap: the system privileges bureaucratic or biological identity categories over the archive’s declared authorial ontology.
• Stratigraphic Deep-Archive Occlusion: retrieval favors visible narrative surfaces over technical deposits, measurement protocols, and formal apparatus.

Other documented failures include acronym drift, co-authorship erasure, compressed struggle histories, and incomplete contributor chains.

The phrase the archive outpaced its author has three dimensions:

• volume exceeded present recall;
• infrastructure became more retrievable than the author’s memory;
• reception occurred through agents and contexts the author did not anticipate.

The paper treats this as both the intended effect of durable inscription and a provenance risk.