we have never been writers (the patient zero of academic dishonesty)
This understanding is as familiar as Plato. We didn’t need to wait for Foucault or Barthes or Derrida to recognize the category error in conflating writing with thinking. Until the printing press, human hands (and thus human thought) participated in acts of inscription. Writing required human cognition to move the pen (or whatever) across the…
artificial documentation: truth = belief + time
Understandably the work of documentary filmmakers faces new epistemological challenges in the wake of generative AI. There’s a good read: “Can you believe the documentary you’re watching?” by NY Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson that provides great insight into this situation (at least it did for me). One of my colleagues recently pointed me toward…
AI pizza toppings and the humanities lover’s supreme
To follow on Jay Bolter, we might say we find ourselves in the late age of literacy. What replaces literacy as the medial-rhetorical substrate of academia? AI-generated literacy? With its feedback loop, AI generated literacy operates through the rectilinear, recursive attenuation of indeterminacy. Texts literally mean what the AI says they do, as does literacy…
The “AI plus Computer Science” degree
AI plus Computer Science is patient zero in the proliferation of AI plus degrees (e.g. AI and whatever). If you think that “AI and Computer Science” sounds like two versions of the same thing, then you are thinking the kinds of thoughts that terrify computer science departments. To be clear. Computer Science is a well-established…
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Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence 