AI and the Craft of Writing

How do we write in an era of AI? How does generative AI (as a text-generating mechanism) impact our society's relationship to written words and the future of the craft of writing? Alexa Alice Joubin theorizes AI in the context of epistemic justice and shares examples of successful classroom writing exercises that use AI tools.
Her public lecture was part of the George Washington University "University Seminar on AI and the Humanities" series, April 3, 2024. It was chaired by historian Katrin Schultheiss.
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00:09 Introduction
02:21 AI and poetry
02:44 Shakespeare's First Folio
03:41 Technologies of representation: Printing press to e-ink
05:44 "Banal" technologies
06:18 Martin Heidegger on mechanical typewriter
06:59 Henry James on fountain pen
08:13 Ecology of written words
09:29 What is academic writing?
11:46 Rhizome by Deleuze and Guattari
12:32 Biased assumptions about "good" writing
15:25 Consequences of biases
16:10 Challenge posed by AI
18:37 Distracted attentiveness
20:34 Future of writing in an age of AI
23:42 Demo: Using AI to re-organize syllabus
26:23 Demo: Using AI to anonymize student papers
28:31 Demo: Using AI to train critical questioning skills
30:43 Meta-cognition
33:06 Demo: Using text-to-image AI to enhance alt-texts
38:19 Conclusion
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Generative AI tools stake claims to anonymized, collective authorship through machine-generated texts that are similar to patterns in the datasets they trained on. The notion of authorship faces new challenges of delineating the agency, knowability, and intentionality of written words.