Composing with AI

Conclusion

This chapter has considered how speculative design can serve as a tool for the critical examination and use of AI text-to-image generation. Although the focus has been on visual texts, a number of the concepts are transferable to other modes of communication. In many ways, the emergence of technologies reliant on large language models is an opportunity for writers to think more deeply about their own craft. As Walter Ong (2012) resonantly explained, writing itself is a technology. The act of writing has always existed in a space of tension between the past and the future. Through the manipulation of material tools and human symbols, we generate texts that encourage new understandings by remixing past understandings.

Beyond writing itself, many of the tools professionals use to gather and communicate data are also entangled with the past. In the field of urbanism, professional tools used by city planners and engineers are explicitly designed to recreate (rather than re-imagine) the existing elements of the built environment. It seems only sensible to design new streets based on our knowledge of past streets rather than rethink the nature of the street itself each time a road is called for. However, this way of engaging with the world creates entrenched patterns that can replicate bias and exclusion (like sidewalks without wheelchair access or public spaces only accessible to car owners).

Emergent technologies do not fundamentally change the purpose of communication. However, they do pose new questions, especially as AI begins to act as a mediating influence between the communicative acts of the past and the communicative acts of the future. Generative AI technology allows us to shift some of the labor of symbolic work to algorithmic functions. But, by doing so, we may risk offloading the work that is most important: our ability to imagine and communicate new futures—possibilities that loosen our entanglements to the past and propel humanity forward. Speculative design can help human communicators re-consider not only what kind of work they do but also what kind of beings they are. Specifically, in Gries' (2019) terms, it can help us remember that we are "assembling beings" with the "ability to assemble and distribute discourse that can, in turn, assemble and reassemble bodies around a shared concern" (p. 336).

A speculative approach to generative AI can help us further examine what it means to exist as an assembling being and how new things (especially new futures) emerge from the fragments of the old. Such a perspective can help us identify new ways to work with AI systems serving as mediators between ourselves and a collective, partial past.