The Ubuntu manual page for "ls" neither explains what the "author" is and it also does not mention that the option only applies to long format.
From a GNU/Hurd man page:

--author List each file's author when producing long format directory
listings. In GNU/Hurd, file authors can differ from their owners, but
in other operating systems the two are the same.

Example:

ls -l --author

total 0

lrwxrwxrwx 1 rinzwind rinzwind rinzwind 20 2011-06-18 19:33 Desktop

will shows 3 names instead of 2 (owner, group, author).

I found some good information on this on an old mail archive for gnu from 2002 but in Ubuntu it is the same as the user name.

If you need to set 'author' the idea is you create a man page for your function and add an author tag in the man page. Unless you use something other than Ubuntu and actually can set this.