Composing with AI

Introduction

As Johnson (2023) recently reminded writing faculty, computers and writing/digital rhetoric scholarship, pedagogy, and experience have prepared us for teaching with developing technologies—AI presents a new challenge but not one that should cause us panic. After all, as Johnson and Agbozo (2022) emphasize, faculty "have been using technology to teach, critique, and remediate the writing process for more than one hundred years" (p. 158). We have a rich scholarly tradition that demonstrates basic principles, including that all technologies are political and rhetorical and that "policing is not pedagogy" (Johnson, 2023, p. 172). In 1999 at another pivotal moment in the history of teaching with technologies given the rapid development of the web and digital composing, Selfe admonished all writing faculty at CCCCs to pay attention to and interrogate the use and construction of technologies because failing to do so allows the social inequities they exacerbate to go unchallenged. Many scholars embraced that perspective and examined writing and communication technologies in terms of their construction, labor implications, and ethical ramifications. Based in the extensive scholarly tradition, our chapter highlights some of the strategies scholars have already developed to work with digital technologies, however new and powerful, to enhance our writing pedagogies and prepare our students for all contexts. We argue that we have access to the most qualified scholars to address the challenges of AI because they recognize solutions to conundrums presented by previously developed digital platforms and tools.

To this end, our chapter focuses on three central themes present in the literature that we saw as most generative when grappling with AI. These themes include the challenges posed to our conceptions of writing and authorship; the access and accessibility implications of information and communication technologies; and the degree to which technologies reveal and mask their mediation of content. Our chapter draws upon only a small amount of the wealth of scholarship from the vast corpus related to computers and writing and digital rhetoric; we selected texts that most resonated with our focus, knowing that coverage was not feasible. Additionally, our chapter addresses only the chatbot or text generation type of generative AI, while acknowledging that many other types exist that create visual, audio, and multimedia compositions. Our discussion is enhanced by short video responses that we integrated into our chapter that provide four scholars’ responses to this question: What are the central lessons that our field of computers and writing learned in working with past digital technologies that can best prepare us to assist our faculty and students when composing with generative AI? As these videos illustrate, our field has a wealth of relevant knowledge to draw upon and this knowledge continues to grow and inform how we as scholars and faculty navigate researching, writing, and teaching with AI. We present our chapter to provide some of those lessons and outline directions for future research tackling the difficult problems posed by our changing scholarly and pedagogical environments.