That is, and following on the last post, given that we will all be standing on the over-developed buttocks of satisfactory AI. (btw, sometimes you just have to chuckle at AI generated images)

Remember when this was the most cliché of interview questions? Now we face it with some stoicism, some amor fati. But I’ll approach it with some blinders on; you don’t want to look directly into the future.

What does the discipline of rhetoric look like in a world where machines produce most of the writing? Humans stay in the loop. Humans have to stay in the loop because the writing is for us. The roles of authors, readers, and audiences will change maybe. But there’s a deeper question here. What will we make of AI pronouncements? Will we view their analysis as accurate if it is based on verifiable facts? Do we take them as instructions? Do we review them unedited as a committee or community? Or are they part of the work product of an author who uses other tools in addition to generative AI to compose a text? The answer is almost certainly “yes, and…” And this is where rhetoric will operate because rhetoric focuses on the human capacities for communication, for symbolic behavior, so as long as humans exist, rhetoric will exist.

That said, first-year composition will simply have to change. We know as a discipline that writing is not an effectively generalizable skill. I think we are all on board with the rejection of “basic skills” as a useful concept. 5 years from now, we’ll all be writing scintillating prose(?). This blog will write itself, maybe just ping me to give it a quick once over before publishing. Or maybe not. It’s the work of writing in the age of AI reproduction. What good will it be? We still need to learn to communicate because only we know what we want to say. I don’t care how good AIs get at predicting my prose. So rhetoric continues and maybe even a first-year course but as something quite different I imagine.

And then there are all the other courses and disciplines. I am thinking mostly in the arts and humanities, as I always have my work hat on partly. AI is going to continue to transform media production, and not just stuff generated from a prompt, but in every aspect, every keystroke, every perturbation to media’s many sensors. This transforms the arts professionally and academically as well. And again, it’s satisfactory AI. Pedagogically, the humanities are based on reading and producing texts and their fundamental claim (“value proposition”) is to foster cultural literacy. AI cuts through the pedagogy and potentially undermines humanities’ value proposition through its capacity to produce satisfactory text.

This isn’t a box of Cracker Jacks, so there’s no prize at the bottom. There’s no answer because the answer hasn’t been built yet. What can you see from atop those buttocks?