There has always been a certain aura to writing, as an expression of a self, a self of senses held in common, a common sense self. Think of Kittler’s discussion of handwriting and moving to the typewriter. So now-ish, AI will be producing prose and operating as a rhetorical agent in a number of common rhetorical situations. Who are those rhetorical selves? Are they selves at all? Or is that not the right question? If we do not begin with the image of the common sense self writer, then we have to rethink… which is not to say that common sense writers never existed. I’m talking about them right now after all. But we might think differently about how they came into existence.

In any case, I work at a university with tens of thousands of these “writers.” (I don’t want to have to keep on writing “common sense.”) They all use writing (and reading) in dozens of ways everyday. You all know this. We’re all writers here.

Over the next 3 to 5 years, AI is going to become integrated into virtually every screen based activity we do. I mean it’s already there in so many ways behind the scenes. If you think about how in 2010 most people didn’t have smartphones and by 2020 everyone was addicted to smartphones, then that’s what is about to happen with AI but faster and easier as it will just slip into all the interfaces we already use. We already have that with Google.

During this period, higher education will become thoroughly integrated with AI. All the enterprise software systems that already shape university culture will be integrated with AI. All the everyday tools we use to work (MS-Office, the internet, databases, etc.) will also, as will all of our personal devices.

AI will produce writing. Will it become a writer? Will any of that change our identity as writers?

I am guessing that I will continue to imagine myself as a self with something to say. Though I imagine my experience of being a common sense writer is nothing more or less than that, my experience. That is the extent of its reality. Now, is my identity as a writer devalued in the marketplace because an AI can produce something that satisfices the need for the writing I produce? I don’t know. I don’t think my writing is worth that much in a monetary sense anyway. There’s no market driven need. The most you could do is confuse readers as to which texts are mine and which just appear to be mine. And what if I come across such writing, built by an AI on my writing, can I claim it as my own? What makes writing my own anyway? That I can truthfully claimed to have experienced some version of it in thought before it appeared in text?

Let me put this differently. There are different kinds of reading situations. Sometimes you read something because you want to know a person’s thoughts on a subject. There would be no point in reading some AI’s rendering of what a person’s thoughts might be. However, in other situations, you are just looking to complete a transaction, retrieve information, or receive objective analysis (in scare quotes if I must). So the value of my personal thoughts written down can’t be devalued simply by producing simulacra. Unless of course the market doesn’t care whether it’s my thoughts or not.

Meanwhile, AI is sure to change my processes. I imagine my successor as department chair will have access to a whole new suite of data analytics, and I have access to a fair amount. Having an AI assistant will hopefully make it easier to navigate. As the capacities increase so do the expectations. There’s not going to be a way of doing this job and not working with the tools. As a scholar, if I could have an AI scan journal articles for a set of highly-tuned preferences, pick ones of interest, and write abstracts of each, I feel like that would be helpful. And as a teacher of course I will be immersed in an AI media ecology. All these roles require writing selves, and if those selves don’t exist then we’ll just have to invent them: a new writing self interwoven with new composing technologies.

But there is still that experience of the common sense self, the clearinghouse for all the senses that unifies them and puts names to their inputs. That self will still desire expression. It will still be curious. It will still want to learn, even if it doesn’t always seem that way in the classroom. The media ecology will be different.