Content area
Full text
In 2015, when (re)considering his much-cited essay "Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis," John Trimbur recognized how "the rise of new digital media, new information economies, new means of knowledge production, and new technologies of surveillance" has contributed to the continued deployment of discourses of crisis "opening up all kinds of new opportunities for mass media pundits, scolds, killjoys, and 'death of the book' curmudgeons." Of course, the latest literacy crisis around AI and Large Language Model (LLM)-generated writing proves Trimbur's point well. I was truly amazed, perhaps even baffled, by the intensity of the AI literacy crisis discourse when I presented a version of this essay at CCCC 2023 as part of "ChatGPT, Magical Thinking, and the Discourse of Crisis," a special session organized by Frankie Condon and also featuring remarks from Antonio Byrd, Harry Denny, Aimée Morrison, and Charles Woods. In the time since that session, the discourse of crisis has, somehow, continued to elevate, especially with the introduction of GPT-4 by OpenAI and similar tools like Google's Bard, not to mention the advent of AI "detection software" from the likes of the controversial plagiarism detection giant TurnItIn. While a lot has changed since I drafted my initial thoughts (and no doubt more will change during the publication process of this essay), I maintain my position that, while this iteration of AI technology is new and needs to be addressed on its own terms, our general approach to AI and writing should follow core tenets set out and cited in decades of scholarship and pedagogy in computers and writing, digital rhetorics, technical communications, and our allied fields.
To invoke Rihanna: Don't act like you forgot.
Turning to computers and writing, digital rhetoric, and technical communication scholarship, I'd like to (re)consider a few things we already know about teaching writing with and through technology. I do not mean to represent the following as the only things we know; certainly, naming what we know can be a limiting endeavor (Wardle and Adler-Kassner 6). Instead, I offer the following tenets so that we might "make sense of, to pay attention to, how technology is now inextricably linked to literacy and literacy education," as we undertake the task of rhetorically responding to AI and LLMs with and...